~Memphis Journal~

Hi Y'all! Hey, did we have an awesome weekend in Memphis or what? All I can keep saying is how proud I am of this team. We have really started to turn this program around and Memphis was a great example of what our potential is. This was definitely a momentum booster for this team to finish out the rest of the 1999 season and head into next year at Daytona. I'm going to let you in on a little secret that I discovered this weekend. It sure is great to start up front. It's been since July since we had a Top 10 starting spot and on a track like Memphis it can really make a difference to start and run up front. There were several accidents in the race on Sunday that happened in the middle of the field where the cars got bunched up on restarts. It just takes a little of the pressure off of you to know that there are only four or five cars in front of you that you need to worry about getting together rather than twenty or thirty cars to watch out for. To be honest we were not all that fast during practice so I was not expecting to go out on Saturday and contend for the pole. It just shows how hard the team worked to pull everything together. After we qualified all we could do was to sit back and see if anyone would beat us. I sat on top of the hauler and watched the rest of the field qualify. I knew there were still some guys who had a good shot at knocking us off of the pole, Jeff Green being one of them because he had been running great all weekend. You could tell Jeff ran a good lap when he qualified and he beat us by almost a full tenth of a second. He is one of the best qualifiers in the Busch Series so I wasn't that disappointed to be starting second. As far as the race goes, we were a lot better on long runs so all of the wrecks and restarts hurt us a little. I really just tried to use my head during the race and hit all my marks. Patience was definitely a key for me on Sunday. I realized that at the beginning of a run I was not as fast as say Earnhardt, Jr. or Kensenth so I would let them get by so we didn't loose time to the leaders trying to race one another. To sum it up, we had a great car, great stops and a great team this weekend. I would have been proud of this team no matter where we finished this weekend, but a Top Five is a great run for this team and hopefully we will have another great weekend at Phoenix. We don't really have a lot of down time this weekend since we had a Sunday race and then a West Coast race on the following Saturday. It's a tough deal especially for the team having to prepare the cars and get them out on the road for the long haul to Arizona. I'm looking forward to racing at Phoenix though. My dad really likes the track so I can't wait to see if we can pull off another Top Five this weekend. Hey, as always thanks for all your support and prayers. It was neat to get home and see all of y'all had written in on the web site, congratulating us on a great run. That really means a lot to me and hopefully you will be having a lot to write about after the race in Phoenix. God Bless, Adam