Get well soon Joseph Howard and Ian Cooper!

DATE: APRIL 22, 2009

I'm writing this as I'm en route to Kent in England for Round 4. The track is called Brands Hatch, and anyone not familiar with international motorsports (meaning, like half of the teams in the garage/paddock) probably doesn't know what the track is like.

I thought the name Brands Hatch was a really goofy name until I read its Wikipedia page and there's actually a good reason for it to be called Brands Hatch. I think it's just me having a blonde moment.

Apparently it's derived from this awesome sounding Gaelic word that I was trying to sound out with Rachel that means some kind of forest entrance. Ain't it funny that Karjala has more trees than Brands Hatch? Then again, Karjala probably has more trees than some rally tracks.

Speaking of Rachel, this is the first time we've really gone to a race together. It seems kind of odd, but let me fill you in. We're half-sisters, with different mothers (both of whom ironically divorced our dad), and we've never been that close to each other, but it felt really good to spend the flight with Rachel and her boyfriend (can I add that her boyfriend is like, twice my size?). He's actually a pretty nice guy. Yuliya (Julia Nosova) was also there but she slept the entire flight.

Rachel did awesome in Joliet, and I told her that on the flight.

Time for my Joliet rant.

We. Sucked.

No seriously, we were crap. Mike fucked up big time and I let him know it after the race. We can't qualify 40th and run last on lap 3. Especially at Joliet, where like everyone I'm going to fight against for the title is going to do well.

That first caution really helped us because we could make the car not suck as much and actually go for a top 30. Yuliya, Ian, and Zach all seemed to know what they were doing, but we were just fucking slower than a '57 Eubank.

Speaking of slow, I think that describes everyone's thought processes. Especially when you're getting lapped by your own fucking teammate!

I don't know about Joel. He's a nice guy if you're not on his team, from what I'm told. I remember he tried to ask me for dinner once but my mother was at the track, so family came first. I guess I don't know him well enough, but him at that team was a gigantic mess right from the start. Either way it didn't seem like he had an excuse for being a complete dumbshit and wrecking a bunch of cars. I mean, you've got mirrors, three of them, USE THEM.

Congratulations, Joel Rodriguez, you smashed up like half the field and put two drivers out for Brands Hatch. Oh wait, three if you count yourself, numbnuts!

Before I forget, Get well Joseph Howard! I'll miss seeing you at the track! I'd say the same about Ian but Ian will be at the track, just probably not driving in the race.

I hear Lance is going to drive the 44 car on home turf. I've never had much opportunity to race against Lance, but from what Leonid tells me that's a real shame. I watched some of his older races and he would do the strangest things, so you never knew what he had up his sleeve. Guess that's why they used to call him Pokerface in the early 90s.

Don't know about sponsors but I don't think Flash Racing is worried about that. Lance is a big enough personality to get sponsors, and you can bet there will be a lot of 44 and 26 (Lance's old number) flags in the stands. I even heard that Lance asked Alan Hodges if he could rent the #26 for one race. Don't think the folks at Haas Manufacturing took that one well...

Still, I want to race against Lance. It seems like something I just have to do. I know he was in the field for this race last year but we weren't really near each other at all. I don't know, rite of passage?

After Brands, we go to Texas World. Great. If you haven't been posted on that, there's a big problem with tire wear where the Saar and Lenard cars can run with like half the tire wear of the other cars (I'd explain if I knew exactly how), and Texas World is another big fast track. I've heard that Leonid Roderick and FLASH are going to make a huge stink about it if this whole tire wear saga isn't cleaned up soon. I heard that STS has told their teams to do likewise. I know Flavio Vespucci of Arrowtech will raise hell, and STS has two of the loudest mouths in the garage with Brian Sendack and Manny Brown.

Leonid has a lot of support in the garage, and I know he doesn't like Texas World anyway because the track doesn't have those SAFER barriers that Joliet has, so a hit into the wall at 180 will be worse than a 210 hit at Joliet... or something like that.

The officials have told the team bosses that they are not to cause a disturbance over the tire deal and just make better cars. Well, excuse me, but an entire marque can't just redo its chassis midseason, especially when Saar and Lenard are supposedly not going by the rules anyway. It's a complicated issue, I'll talk about that one later.

Hopefully the officials learned their lesson from Joliet and will mandate the superspeedway safety addons. I honestly think they didn't think we'd run 212 there. They made an honest mistake but it wasn't as bad as it could have been.

Bye for now!
- A.R.