It’s common knowledge that once you master the tricky science of remaining upright while also propelling yourself forward when being connected to the ground by nothing more that two thin rubber tires, you’ll always be able to ride a bike. Or is it a horse? No, it’s definitely a bike. Horses may make horsepower but they don’t have tires. Today I’m pleased to announce that the same “once you learn it” theory applies to doing PR for a Funny Car driver while at a race track. I can still ride the bike!
Doing the Pomona PR from Kauai was a good way to ease back into it, but Phoenix was a full-on reintroduction to the whole process. And it was fantastic. It was exactly as I’d assumed it would be, as in “Like I never left.” And that’s a very good thing. Of course, I’ve often referenced my stress over travel so, needless to say, on this first venture back to the trenches I made my outbound travel nearly as stressful as possible. When I booked the trip I was deep into a mental mode of “save as much money as possible” and that meant trying the risky approach of flying to Phoenix on Friday morning. What was I thinking?
There was genuinely almost no room for error, and how often is there any error in play when flying 1,900 miles, getting out of the airport and picking up a car, driving through Phoenix traffic, and then getting my credential, getting parked, and getting in? Piece of cake, right? Actually, it almost was. We were a few minutes early into Phoenix but then had to wait 10 minutes for our gate to open up. Baggage claim was a little slow (I decided to go “fully prepared” with all the clothes and shoes I’d need, so I had to check my bag) and the rental car bus was packed, but the traffic wasn’t too bad getting down to Chandler. That part was all pretty easy.
Once I got off I-10 (which is technically I-10 eastbound but from Phoenix to Tucson the freeway actually runs due south) I got to play the fun games the police officers create, wherein orange cones are everywhere and drivers are sent on a circuitous path around the track, even having us go the wrong way on a one-way segment of road, to come into the track right behind the tower. The Credentials trailer, however, is back up near the off ramp from the freeway. I could see it clearly as I exited I-10 but couldn’t get to it from there, thanks to all the orange cones and the police cruisers with flashing lights blocking the way. Once at Credentials, I walked up to the window where my friend Laura Contreras-Rust was working, and I told her the Media Relations staff should have left my hard card and parking pass there. They should have, but they didn’t. Shocking right? Who knew I wasn’t the most important thing for all of them to think about?
This is where it’s a great thing to have longterm friendships with people who can help in situations like this.
Laura called the Media Center and was told that my hard card and parking pass were safe and sound, in the bag of one of the managers. That’s a very safe place to have your credential, if you can magically get parked and get through the gates in order to put your hands on it. Fortunately, for me, Laura never hesitated. She gave me a Friday pass and a parking decal. Day officially saved. She’s always been a good friend and a very adept problem solver. Thank you, Laura!
I then drove back down to the entrance and got parked. As I got out of my car, the first pair of Pro Stock cars were doing their burnouts. Made it by THAT much. It was almost like I knew what I was doing.
I walked up to the second floor of the smaller tower, the one just to the left of the starting line, and as I entered the Media Center they handed me my stuff. I then dropped my backpack in the PR rep’s Media Center (more about that in a minute) and rushed out to the Worsham & Fink pit area. I wasn’t sure where they were parked, but the good thing about Phoenix (sometimes it’s a good thing) is that the Nitro pits are just one long aisle with transporters parked on either side. At some point, you’ll come to your destination. Much to my glee, Del and Chuck’s pit area was right at the start of the long line of big rigs.
Was I a little nervous walking in? Maybe a little, but just in the “first day of school” kind of way. The team hadn’t pushed back yet, so greetings were spoken, hands were shaken, hugs were shared, and the first day of school was officially underway. My first order of business was hat related. None of my hats from the Wilkerson era really applied to Del or his sponsors, so I wore a Twins cap on the plane. Before the guys pushed out of the pit, I found a new TRD (Toyota Racing Development) hat and I looked the part. Maybe I looked a part, but I’m not sure what the part was, exactly. Kind of like a cameo walk-on part. It might take an hour for me to feel totally at home and dialed-in.
I’ve been going to the Phoenix track since the first year I was in the sport, and the main Media Center has always been in the same room, on the second floor of the tower. But, there’s also always been a continuing problem with it. It’s too small. You can cram a lot of people into the small space but if the PR staff has done a good job and there are multiple reporters there, you can’t really fit more than one or two team PR reps in there with them. For a few years, they utilized a smallish dungeon of a room on the ground floor, but there’s a patio in front of the tower and spectators blocked the view. It wasn’t a good solution.
So, a few years back they started positioning a trailer right behind the tower. To be fair to everyone, all the team PR reps work in there, but there’s plenty of space for everyone to do that. Is it perfect? Well, it has no view of the track at all, so there’s that, but we’ve dealt with that at other venues, too. They put a nice flatscreen TV in there with us, with a live feed, so even though the trailer absolutely shakes and moves whenever two Nitro cars launch, everyone has to watch on TV. It also doesn’t have air conditioning, although on Friday and Saturday when everyone was wearing heavy coats as the temperature struggled into the high 50s (felt warm to me!) we didn’t need AC. It got pretty stuffy in there, on Sunday, though.
The funny thing about our little PR home were the bars on the windows. They gave it a nice little comfy “jail cell” sort of feel. It was really quite lovely. Honestly, it’s better than that ground floor room they used before, and the TV is just fine.
What’s great for me is that so many of my former colleagues are still around doing the same jobs. To see people like Kelly Topolinski, Sadie Glenn, Allison McCormick, Leah Vaughn, Dave Densmore, Cody Poor, and everyone else was a real “welcome home” moment as well. Plus, Courtney Enders was back in the room, doing some work for her sister. You know, her sister Erica. I’ve known Courtney for many years but we’ve never really spent much time together, so it was nice to sit next to her in the trailer. She had a great view of the staging lanes if she looked between the bars.
Courtney was actually sitting at the window you can see in this photo, right above the metal stairs. I kept thinking it would be so easy to scare her to death by popping up unexpectedly while returning to the trailer, especially if I could find a gorilla mask, but I decided I didn’t yet know her that well and on top of that it was just too easy. I aim to provide more sophisticated humor.
And speaking of the crew of talented PR people I’m once again working alongside, it’s easy to notice that a very high percentage of them are women. I think that’s great, but what I think is even more great is how damn good they are at what they do. As talented and hard-working a group as any I’ve ever known. Though work is the priority, there’s time for laughs as well and this bunch has a great time working together. But I’ll say it again… They’re really good at what they do and their teams and drivers are lucky to have them.
Once we were in the lanes for our first qualifying run, I had a chance to see everyone on Team Wilkerson, so that was great as well. They were pitted all the way down at the other end of the Nitro pits, so I never got down there, but I figured I’d run into them in the lanes. The hug from Krista Wilkerson was much appreciated.
At the starting line, I was a little bit like a fish out of water. Del doesn’t use a video camera now, so I didn’t have that to do. In addition, since I’m not going to travel to all the races the team attends, I didn’t want to take on some starting line role that someone else would have to pick up when I’m not there, so I just stood behind the car with the rest of the crew. John Fink and I did bring back our patented fist bump, right after the burnout. Just like riding that bike!
There was a good crowd there on Friday, as compared to a typical Friday at any race. What happened Saturday and Sunday, though, was incredible.
On Saturday, as we were about to make our run in Q3, the traffic coming into the track was still backed up to the exit ramp off I-10. Then they filled all the parking areas on the southwest side of the track, so they started sending people back up to the huge lots on the northeast side, across the lake from where we were pitted. There’s a road course over there, but boy oh boy is that a long walk to the gate. By the time the traffic all got in and got parked, a lot of people had missed all of Q3. And I’ve never seen that many cars parked over there. At the time, I was pretty convinced it was the most people I’ve ever seen there, whether it was still called Firebird Raceway back in the day or Wild Horse Pass Motorsports Park like it is now. The place was jammed.
When I arrived on Sunday, around 8:30, traffic was already backed up getting off the interstate. Once I parked behind the tower and walked in to the pit area, I looked across the lake and saw they’d already started moving the incoming cars to that side. Again, a lot of people misjudged the traffic and missed first round, so I hope that’s something that can be helped in the future, but the sight of so many fans jammed into the venue was really encouraging. As it turned out, Sunday was a total SELL OUT and apparently, from what I was told, Saturday just missed that designation by a few hundred. It was truly wall-to-wall and the pits were totally packed.
As for our team, things didn’t go that well. The car was really giving Del fits and driving him crazy, but that was the case for a lot of teams. The air was fantastic, the track temp was right where you’d want it, but a lot of teams had a hard time hitting the tune-up right on the sweet spot. We spun, shook, and Del pedaled his way into the field in the No. 16 spot. On Sunday, we lost in the first round to the eventual race winner, Courtney Force.
Speaking of the Force family, I assume all of you reading this have seen the video of John’s big wreck with Jonnie Lindberg. It happened not long after I took the photo of the starting line and the crowd. I was just hanging out back there (and hey, the guy that operates that huge boom camera is REALLY good at it) and when I saw the body shred off John’s car I knew it was bad. But then, with the cars being so far away and with so much stuff flying around, it was weird to see both cars hitting both walls. It looked like a kid had taken two of his die-cast cars and tied their wheelie bars together with a shoestring, and then he’d pull them around and shake them. That’s what it looked like, but I knew it was far more serious than a kid with two toys.
Alan Reinhart is a pro’s pro who knows how this works. It may be worrisome or frustrating for the fans, but he will not speculate at all until he gets official word from the scene. When that takes a while, we all worry. I walked back into our PR trailer and waited it out with my colleagues. When word that John was “awake and alert, and talking to the Safety Safari” came over the P.A., everyone finally took a breath. Once they had John out of the car, they could also show the wreck replay on the big screen, so we could also see it on the TV we had. It was hard to watch, but all of us were glued to it.
When I got back to the pit, Del was just getting back from the scene. He took a scooter up there to check on John and Jonnie. He agreed with my assessment of, “There were a lot more ways this could’ve ended horribly than there are ways it didn’t.” The fact Jonnie Lindberg had a tire mark on his helmet, from Force’s left rear slick, is evidence enough of that.
Right before the final round, when it was clear Force was okay (Lindberg walked away fine) I thought I might be able to get out of town that night. There were a few seats left on a 7:20 flight to Minneapolis, so I said goodbye to everyone and headed to my hotel in Mesa. I’d still need to pack and get back to the airport if I thought I could make it, but once I got there I called Delta and all those seats had been sold. The flight was actually in an oversold situation by then, and the agent said, “I wouldn’t go to the trouble of checking out of your hotel and driving to the airport. You’d have a very small chance of getting on.”
So I watched the final round on my laptop, and once it was over I emailed my Post-Event Report to my mailing list. Still had one more night in the hotel, but my first in-person race as a PR rep since November, 2015 was in the books. It was notable how much it felt liked I’d never been gone.
I know most of the guys on Del’s team, and the ones I hadn’t met seemed like great guys, too. They all get along very well. By the end of the weekend, it not only felt like I’d never left, it felt like I’d never left Del, Chuck, and the team. The fact Chuck laughed as he squirted me with the gas bottle, on the shoe and pant leg, a couple of times right before they fired up the car at the water box, was a kind of classic “Welcome back” if there ever was one.
Del decided to stay and test on Monday, and when he called me on Tuesday I could tell he was glad they did that. They made some wholesale changes and they all worked. It went right on down there and even ran a 3.97 despite the fact he lifted so early he had no problem reading the numbers as he passed the scoreboard. Yes, it was just testing but sometimes you can actually put together enough data to win the next race after running at the so-called Monday Nationals. I think he has a handle on it now, and it felt good for me have those conversations with him. It was not lost on me that back when we first started together I didn’t have a prayer of having these conversations. I’ve learned a lot about the sport and the car over the years. To talk about it at something close to his level, while understanding what he was saying and even having some suggestions, was fantastic. We’ve both come a long way.
One of the real highlights of the entire weekend was seeing this guy. If you’ve been a longtime blog reader or if you’ve read “Bats, Balls, & Burnouts” you’ll know his name. This is Joe Spica. He was the marketing guy on our program for CSK Auto from Day 1 in 1997 until the final day of our sponsorship in 2008. We worked together on just about everything, and to this day I can say for a fact there is no one I ever worked with, at any job, with whom I talked more on the phone than Joe. I’d say over the course of 12 years we had to average two or three phone calls a day. I don’t call Barbara two or three times every day!
We were able to work so well together because we both took our jobs very seriously, and we worked as a team to make the sponsorship a true partnership. Joe felt like the sponsorship was his baby at CSK, and I felt the same way at Worsham Racing.
On top of all that, we simply got along great. We could shift from serious PR or marketing conversations straight into stuff that would have us both cracking up. I’m so glad he came out to the track for a day.
And if you did read the book, you’ll likely remember my favorite Joe Spica quote. It happened when a whole bunch of us were trying to keep up with a new celebrity friend we’d just met, at the MGM Grand in Vegas, but our new friend was dodging and weaving through the crowd with his head down, while a dozen of us were like kittens running in every direction. Joe then shouted the famous words, “C’mon, everybody! We’re losing Huey!!!” As in Huey Lewis. We’re still laughing about that one.
It was a great weekend. It was great to be “home” again. It was great to share the PR room with so many of my talented colleagues, even if it was a trailer with bars on the windows. And I’m really looking forward to the next one. But I won’t fly to many more on Friday. Just sayin’…
I’ll see you next week. Until then, you know the drill… If you just read this and kinda sorta liked it, please “Like” it by clicking the button at the top. Thank you!
Bob Wilber, at your service and still riding that bike.