Crappy Pics from a Crappy Race
The folks at Lance Co were kind enough to host us at the race in Dover, DE yesterday. The owner of Haas Automation (we own 18 of their machines with 3 more on the way) owns the 66 & 70 cars that run in the Sprint Cup series so Lance decided to host a Skybox event with support from the team. The president of Lance, Ed, had invited us to a couple of races previously, but we weren’t able to overcome our dread of the traffic for that race and hadn’t previously attended. Well the traffic did live down to its billing but we still had a great day.
The day started very early as we had to pick up our customer at the hotel @ 6:00am in Plymouth Meeting. We got to within 1.5 miles of the exit to the track on DE Route 1 in about an hour, and then it took another hour to get into the track and get parked. Ed had generously included a parking pass for the Skybox lot, so we were right up by the track. He had recommended getting there early because of that traffic, and it was good advice. We arrived just after 8 and they didn’t open the gate for the Skyboxes until just before 9, but then we were able to take the elevator up and get some coffee and get registered.
We were included in the first two groups for the pit tour and it was definitely the highlight of the day. Our group had a gentleman named Carey from the team show us around. What a madhouse it is down there, and I’m sure it’s worse at Dover than a lot of other places. The infield is shoe-horned inside the horse track and there’s not a lot of space. You really have to keep your head on a swivel as the teams are pushing the cars around to the inspection points getting ready for the race. We talked a bit with a couple of crewman and got a tour through the hauler. The inventory they have of spare parts, all the computers, etc is pretty damned amazing.
After the tour we headed back up to the Skybox and had a couple of hours to kill before the race. They fed us a nice lunch and a few beers and Combos helped kill the time. Combos had given a truckload of snack packs to the track for the suites as part of a promo with eventual race winner Kyle Busch’s car. We were joking around about having lots of space in Joe’s truck for it and the guy from catering that was in the suite at the time while on the phone to the kitchen to order more food trays says “suite 322 loves the Combos, bring lots of Combos.” We were soon awash in Combos… managed to leave with only 4 packs despite their best efforts.
