Talladega Diary, Day 1

Well, I’m here in Talladega for the race
this weekend. I’m covering the action for Racing
Information Systems. I thought it’d be interesting to kind of keep a daily
diary of what happens during a race weekend.

(11:00 am) Got to the track after about a
3.5 hour drive from Nashville.  Went to the credential office and picked up
the garage pass and my media center/press box credentials. Looks like I’ve got
everything I need.  The ARCA cars are on the track for their 3 hour
practice. Seems like there aren’t that many here.

(1:00 pm) Practice for the ARCA cars has just concluded (1:00
pm), so it’s pretty quiet outside right now. I’ve just gotten back from a stroll
through the ARCA garage. I kind of thought that the ARCA cars would be using the
same aerodynamic modifications that the Winston Cup cars are, but they’re
not.  Oh, special thanks to the folks from Lincoln Electric Welders for the
hamburgers.

(1:10 pm) They’re
getting ready to have a press conference here put on by GM. They’re talking
about the Make A Wish Foundation and GM’s involvement in that. The GM Dealers in
the area have gotten together to bring a couple of families to the track this
weekend, and have donated over $30,000 to the Foundation.

Looking at the ARCA practice sheet, it
looks like the ARCA cars may well be faster this weekend than the Winston Cup
cars.  Matt Hutter turned a speed of just over 189 mph in their only
practice today.

There was a rumor going around that there
was going to be an extra practice today for the Winston Cup cars. That was just
what it was, a rumor.  The Winston Cup garage is empty except for the
Goodyear guys who are mounting tires.

(2:00 pm) Just went on another tour of the ARCA
garage. The teams at this race run the gamut from guys towing their cars
here with a dually and a covered trailer to the haulers you see in the Winston
Cup garage. One thing the ARCA teams have that I don’t think I’ve seen in the
Winston Cup garage is women.  That is, women working on the cars. 
There’s only a couple of teams with females, but they’re there under the hood
just like the guys are.

Got a chance to talk a few minutes with
Brad Baker. Brad runs in the Nashville Speedway USA Late Model Stock Car
Division, and is making his first career ARCA start. Why’s he running here this
weekend? To get superspeedway experience so that NASCAR will let him run the
Busch Series next February at Daytona.

(2:45 pm) Looks like the start of qualifying for the
ARCA cars has been delayed for some reason. It was supposed to start 15 minutes
ago, but they’re still not on the track.

They finally started qualifying about 20
minutes late.  Normally they pipe the PA feed through the speakers in the
media center, and I input the qualifying times as they are announced. But for
some reason, they’re not doing that. So instead of having the qualifying results
ready within minutes after qualifying is over, it’ll take me a while to enter
all the numbers and get them posted to Compuserve.

I had a chance to go to the deal that
Winston is having tonight where the No Bull 5 drivers are paired up with the
five fans. Had something to do with skeet shooting which wasn’t really
interesting to me, so I didn’t go.

(3:30 pm) They finally started piping the
qualifying times through the PA in the media center. I started copying down the
times and went back to the ARCA garage where they had a board set up with the
times of the cars that had already run to get the rest of the times. That’ll let
me get out of here a lot sooner.

(4:30 pm) Just nine more cars to go. With
the warm up lap, the two laps of qualifying, and a cool down lap, it takes
almost 4 minutes for each car to qualify. Normally they let the next car go out
shortly after the previous car has taken the checkered flag, but at Talladega,
they want to make sure none of the cars gets a draft during qualifying.

(5:00 pm) Qualifying has just wrapped up.
Kirk Shelmerdine, Dale Earnhardt’s former crew chief, snagged his second pole of
the year, running over 190 mph in the process. I think that’s about the fastest
we’ll see this weekend.  Now I just have to wait for the official ARCA
qualifying rundown, double check it with my results, and post that and a short
story to Compuserve.

(5:45 pm) Still waiting on the results
from ARCA. They say they want to make sure all the cars pass inspection before
releasing the results. OK, but I’ve got to go check into my hotel sometime
soon.  Then the staff in the media center tells me that they have an
unofficial qualifying rundown, but it’s very much subject to change. I’d already
filed a quick story, so I decide to take it and file the  results from the
hotel room.

(7:00 pm) I’m in the hotel room, where
I’ve just finished filing the stuff for Compuserve. 
After I got here I discovered a few discrepancies between the times I’d recorded
and the times that were on the unofficial sheet I got from the media center.
Decided mine were better numbers and posted an "unofficial" rundown.

After I posted the stuff to Compuserve,
I fired up Microsoft FrontPage 2000 (where I’m typing this right now), loaded
this file, and discovered that everything I’d entered from 2:00 pm on hadn’t
been saved. I wondered why it didn’t ask me if I wanted to save my work when I
exited, but didn’t think much about it. Oh well.

I’m staying at the Econo Lodge here in
Anniston.  Econo is not short for "economy." At a whopping
$129 a night, with a minimum 3 night stay, I’d say they’re making a few extra
bucks this weekend. I think I’m going to stay Sunday night so that I can go to
the Dodge test session at the track on Monday. The rate for Sunday night? $69,
which is still a lot for what really should be a $49 room. 

I graduated college with a degree in
Business Management, so I do know a little bit about the law of supply and
demand. When almost 200,000 people converge on a track for a weekend, then
there’s a lot of demand. And the demand goes up the closer you get to the
track. 

But am I really being overcharged? It
takes about 15 minutes to drive to where I’m staying once I leave the track.
I’ve stayed as far away as Carrollton, GA which is an hour’s drive, in
Birmingham, which is about 40 minutes, in Calera, AL, which took about 90
minutes to drive. By staying this close, I don’t have to get up at the crack of
dawn just to get to the track before the rush. My rate last year in Carrolton
was about $60 a night. So I guess I’m paying the extra $210 (over the weekend)
to avoid the 4.5 hours extra in driving time. 

(9:25 pm) Went to get a bite to eat,
watched a little bit of "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" (and nearly choked
to death from laughing), and sat down to prepare Tammy Brewington’s latest
submission, edit her photos, and upload the whole enchilada. She did a nice
piece on the season ticket packages that the new Nashville Superspeedway is
offering. They’re not forcing people to buy a "license" in order to
get the right to buy season tickets and get the same seats every year. They’re
basically saying "if you buy the season ticket package, then you get the
right of first refusal for those same seats year after year."

Think I’m going to make an early night of
it. I don’t know for sure yet, but if they do like they’ve done the last two
years, RJ Reynolds will be throwing a No Bull 5 party tomorrow night that I’ll
be going to. They’re always interesting.

Let me know
what you think of my "diary."  Is it worth my time to put my
thoughts down during the day and post them at night?