~Rockingham Journal~

Hi Y’all! Well it was another wild weekend at Rockingham when it comes to qualifying for the No. 45 Team. Hopefully this weekend at Memphis we’ll get a spot in the Top Ten and not have to sweat it out to see if we will make the race. That sure sounds good, doesn’t it? I’ll tell you what, these past couple of weeks in the Busch Series have made me start to feel a lot older than 19. I mean we were solid all day on Friday in practice, during the second session we were one of the Top 15 fastest cars. We came in early on the second practice because we felt confident that we had the right setup for qualifying. Then we go out for qualifying and the car gets loose in the middle of the turns. Obviously it really affected the performance of the car and the end results from the qualifying run were not what we were expecting. With a shot of getting a provisional out of the picture, we went ahead and packed up and started to head back home. To say the very least, I was really disappointed. I was on my way home when my sister called and told me to turn around because they had disqualified a car and I was back in the race. Well to be honest, at first I didn’t believe her. Finally though I called one of the guys from the team and they said the same thing, “Turn around because we are back in the race.” We missed Happy Hour that day but did get to go into the garage in the morning on Saturday to try and nail down a race setup on the car. Missing Happy Hour was a disadvantage but I was just glad to be running. Maybe more than any other race for our team this year, this race was a learning experience. I haven’t run a lot of laps at Rockingham and to start the race in 42nd position with no final practice, we just didn’t know what to expect from the car or the race. When the race started we just wanted to try and put some room between the leader and us and really to try and stay on the lead lap. After about 50 laps Mark Martin got around us and put us a lap down. At this point, we just tried to stay as close to the front as we could and hopefully if a caution flag fell we could get that lap back. Unfortunately, the caution flags didn’t work in our favor and we didn’t get back on the lead lap but we did manage to miss getting caught up in a wreck and we got some much needed track time at Rockingham. You really can’t complain about coming home in the Top 30 in a race that you thought at one point you wouldn’t even run. This weekend we are heading to Memphis for a Sunday race. This track is new to the Busch Series but I’ve heard it compared to Nashville and Richmond so it should be interesting to see how we run there. We finished 13th at Nashville this season and had a good run at Richmond with a Top Ten in the Truck race. We were running really well at Richmond in the fall Busch race until we got caught up in a wreck so with the good performance we’ve shown at these tracks, overall I feel pretty good about running this weekend at Memphis. Hey, by the way, I just want to say y’all are awesome. When I heard about the 4.5 million hit mark being passed on my website this week, I have to say I was completely blown away. I am really proud of my website and am glad that y’all enjoy it so much. I hope y’all have a great week and we are going to try to get back on track at Memphis. Thanks for all your support and I’ll talk to y’all next week. God Bless, Adam