Two days of racing at Daytona International Speedway will get the juices flowing for racing back home in the Kansas City area. Now the temperature in Daytona is most definitely race weather, temperatures in the 80s, men wearing shorts and short sleeve shirts, women wearing summer clothes and sandals/flip flops, yes, it is nice to come to Daytona for two weeks in February.

At the truck race we started off listening to hometown favorite, Jennifer Jo Cobb. She was surprising everyone running with the lead pack. This truck would suck up well to the lead pack and her spotter was teaching her well on how to break the side draft other trucks were trying to do. Then there was the accident in front of her leading to an extremely hard hit into the interior wall with her truck coming to rest in the ball field area (grass area between track and pit road). So then we switch to listening to Matt Crafton who was not having a good night. At the time we switched he missed his pit box and slid in sideways which created a few expletive words between him and the crew chief, an early pit also created a bit of concern but then they seemed to get it together and were making great progress to the front when Crafton was involved in accident in which the truck bed was nearly destroyed. On pit road the crew was working on it when the track went red and the crew chief was hollering stop stop stop. When they went back to racing Crafton was penalized two laps for working on the truck during a red. So to make a long story short whomever we listened seemed to have bad luck.

The Xfinity race – WOW! If you were not at home watching this race, WOW. You need to catch the replay. Four Green White Checkered attempts to finish the race. During this time a pit crewman for Chase Elliott became a star. The right side window disappeared from his car and the cameras caught first the largest crewman jogging to the pits to get a window when another crewman came on a steady run out of the pits with the window. The crowd erupted in a cheer and believe it or not Chase did not lose a lap. On one restart the leaders took themselves on the back straight. We listened to Elliott Sadler most of the day, they fought back from involvement in early race crash when Sadler felt he had pulled an Evil Knievel escape, through a NASCAR penalty bumper lock penalty for him and Elliott., and a late race spin to finish within an inch of winning the race. Congratulations to Tyler Reddick on the win! His burn out happened right in front of us!

Other notes from the track:

  1. Be watching the Thunderbird Flyover, we saw their practice, believe me my camera will be shooting, it was AWESOME!
  2. Spencer Gallagher is an up and coming fun loving driver! Several spotters noticed how well he drafted and his driver introduction was just plain fun!
  3. Austin Dillon’s racecar on the track was green and yellow but on the television screen it showed black and orange.
  4. Kyle Larson and Chase Elliott leading was fun as they were trying to set each other up with the old high low game at 200+ mph.
  5. Wonder why NASCAR does not break into a driver’s frequency and announce penalties instead of telling the spotters to relay the information. Maybe they need to look into raceivers?

Being at Daytona International Speedway at the races, you get the smell of burning rubber, the smell of race fuel, and the smell racetrack food. Something television will not bring you. I would highly recommend everyone schedule time down here during speedweeks in preparation for local racing! Gets the racing juices flowing!

Daytona 500 here we come, who do I hope wins of course our hometown driver Clint Bowyer, who would I not be surprised to see win, Ricky Stenhouse, he is a make it happen driver.