It was an interesting day today.

First off, the NHRA testing ban on Nitro cars was officially lifted on Monday and today Bob Tasca had his Funny Car on America's Greatest Drag Strip.

Our crew was anxious to get back to doing what we do better than any other track in the country...running nitro powered race cars. We are the premiere testing facility and we've missed out on shooting cars down the quarter-mile...I mean 1,000 footer...for quite some time. I'm glad to say that we're back in business and are proud to be helping the teams get ready for the 2009 season.

After making sure the timing system was hooked up and that our crew had the track dialed-in, I put on the old coat and tie and took off with our P.R. Director Jeff Motley to the State Government Building to meet with Gov. Jim Gibbons. One of the great things that NASCAR has put in place for the Whelen All-American Challenge Series is that each state champion gets a meet-and-greet opportunity with their governor. Motley got our program put in place and we met up with the Bullring track champion Scott Gafforini this morning for this special occasion.

It was an interesting meeting as Gov.Gibbons told us about his love for high-performance driving. He's been through several police agency driving programs and told us about his desire to really go through a high performance racing school. Soon the subject changed from Scotty's championship and trophy to the governor's love of muscle cars. He informed us that he's in the middle of getting an engine rebuilt and is looking at putting a 400 turbojet tranny in his car. That's when Scott told him that if he really wanted to get the car off the line a little better to consider some other options. It was quite surreal. The governor was talking about drag racing, Scotty was talking about street rods and I was thinking about just how cool it is that the governor is a car guy. He asked me to send him a schedule of races because he not only wants to come out to The Strip but he also wants to make a few passes in his own car.

That makes me wonder if we could put together an event out here where we get 50 equally matched cars, strap in 50 governors and let them run the oval, the drag strip and the road course. I'm going to see if our public relations staff of Motley, John Bisci and Aubrey Hall can make that happen. If they can, I'm going to be crew chief for the governor from Alaska...no offense Gov. Gibbons but that would be way cool.

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