This Was More Than A Race, This Was Talladega

Cinco de Mayo weekend has come and gone. The campers and mud covered trucks are headed back home. Talladega Superspeedway is quiet, for a while.

A wild, wet weekend of racing came to a close Sunday evening with Kurt Busch's #78 Furniture Row Chevrolet flying through the air and landing on top of Ryan Newman's car, the second time that's happened to Newman at Dega!

The weekend got started on Friday afternoon when Frank Kimmel won his 77th all-time ARCA Racing Series race, taking the checkered flag in the rain-shortened International Motorsports Hall of Fame 250.

On Saturday it was Regan Smith's turn in Victory Lane as he narrowly inched out his teammate Kasey Kahne and Joey Lagono for the win. Smith stormed to the front with a push from Kahne during the final 400 yards of a green-white-checkered-flag finish and won a race decided when NASCAR called the seventh and final caution an instant before the four cars battling for the win crossed the finish line.

Sunday started out with all forecasters preaching, "rain, rain, rain" which ended up not being the case for most of the morning as the sun stood high in the sky. We loaded up our group of 'Roll To Talladega' winners in a Crown Limousine bus and headed to the track at around 7:30 Sunday. For the most part, we were a subdued bunch until we hit the track! With the exception of myself, my father-in-law, and Ed the bus driver, no one else had ever been to Talladega!

For me, this was exciting news. I was going to get to be a part of their excitement when they first heard the car's engines fire up. I was gonna get to be there when they first smelled that fuel smell and when they first heard the group of cars go by at 185 mph! It was well worth it. Each on of them had smiles on their faces as they stood with their cameras in hand and hair filled with dust and rubber fragments from the track. This is what Dega is all about!

When the rain hit, it hit hard. I guess we all had taken in what we could from the race and at that point decided to make the trek from our seats in the O.V. Hill Grandstands back to the bus parking lot.

We were home in time to see my driver, and the guy I picked to win this race, Kurt Busch get hit from the side and sent on a wild ride getting the inevitable "BIG ONE" out of the way. It was equally exciting, even though Busch didn't win, to see David Gilliland hook onto the rear bumper of his teammate David Ragan and push him to victory!