July 5, 2011

After a free hotel breakfast, we left Winston-Salem and headed to Concord, NC, home of Charlotte (formerly Lowe's) Motor Speedway. Jon had never taken the track tour, and, having remembered how much fun it was to go 85 mph on 24 degree banking, it was a must do.

Even though our tour guide seemed a little too obsessed with the baby (?) on our tour (e.g. "How's the little guy doing?", "Does the little guy like my tour?", "How much did he weigh?") he did drive us onto both the main track and the 2-year-old drag racing track, even though it seemed like someone might have been ready to practice.

In Victory Lane, reporters get specific assignments of where they have to stand. If they move, therefore blocking someone's view, they can get kicked out.

That screen is so big it takes two people to hold the remote! No, really, that's what our tour guide told me...

The Dragway was actually shorter than I would have thought it would need to be to get up to 300+ mph

This is what you run into if your parachute doesn't work

Creating dirt ramps at the Dirt Track, right next to the main track, which itself is further subdivided for local racing

For the second part of our day, we went to the NASCAR Hall of Fame in Charlotte, something I've wanted to do since first reporting on the bidding progress in 2004? 2005?

When we walked in, there was a sign up that NASCAR Sprint Cup driver "Mad" Max Papis was there signing autographs. We later found out they have a driver in every Tuesday. They should advertise this! I asked him if he would be in NH and he said he would.

We skipped up to the second floor so we wouldn't miss Max and then we went back down to watch the introductory video, which I'm pretty sure featured Arkport's Jason Burdett when he was with Jimmie Johnson's team. If not, the "Man" speaking when the closed captioning was up is a pretty close double! We then went down to the first floor, which features cars going up a curved walkway to simulate the various track bankings.

This one demonstrates 33 degrees!

Perhaps even cooler, though, was the information and track surfaces of all the different tracks.

The second floor was comprised of cars of the 2010 Hall of Fame inductees (the 2011 ones were pictured as part of our movie, but didn't see anything else about them). The rest of the floor was Food Lion Speed Week. You went around with a computer programmed card (I picked Jimmie Johnson as my guide, Jon picked Tony Stewart) and then it would record how you did on various tasks. The hard card was VERY touchy though, and would sometimes take a few times to register and not say "logging out" seconds after you put it down. Also, I realize this was designed so that there wouldn't be long lines with people waiting, but it gave you about a minute to design your car, and just when I thought I understood the tutorial about tire pressure, they moved on to shocks and struts. The people on the video guiding us through the demo said, "You don't have much time because you have to make fast decisions in NASCAR." Whatever. And forget about the "inspection" station. (I greatly admire those folks!) My favorite part ended up being the part that looked the most intimidating at the onset - the pit stop. We worked as a team with me jacking up the car, Jon changing a tire with power drill and all and then me gassing the car and dropping the car when the process was complete. We did it in 36 seconds. Not good enough for race day but not bad!

Based on our performance, our hard cards gave us recommendations for the areas we should pursue after Speed Week.

The memorabilia was upstairs on the third floor, along with some interactive trivia for our hard cards. My favorite thing: the 76 ball used by spotters.

That's Jon inside!

After doing some final trivia downstairs (really the first hard card stop, but we didn't see it when we were down on the first level), we had our answer. Both "j.flash" and "highandlowe" made it into the top 20 of visitors for the day.

Even though it was hot "on the track," it was so cold inside the Hall of Fame that we elected to eat our chicken wings at the adjacent Buffalo Wild Wings outside in the 90-degree heat. (Yes, it's a chain, but it's a chain that's outside of our area, meeting the criteria for an allowable stop on a vacation.)

After checking into our hotel, we drove back to Charlotte Motor Speedway for some local racing, featuring kids and adults.

Even with cars being hauled off the track, things always seemed to be in play. Often, a car that would cause a caution would get back in line (it seemed they'd let you have three cautions before they started counting against the 20-lap total. Also fun, our track announcer, who said such gems, as "Who loves Spongebob Squarepants?" and "Who loves Lady Gaga? ... Oh, this is Enrique Iglesias."

It then started to pour, but that didn't stop Lugnut the Charlotte Motor Speedway mascot, from driving a bus ... in a rainstorm ... competing against local school principals. School bus racing: who knew? I took some video of the first laps.

Now that's a scary sight to see!

Trouble in turn one!

Restart

Lugnut (in the orange bus) makes a move!

Lugnut takes the lead!

Uh oh!

The driver of the green bus saves it!

Time for the final laps...

Lugnut takes the checkered flag ...

... and pulls a Tony Stewart!

We learned on our tour that they had extra fireworks from the night before (it rained there too) so we also got to see another show (with what sounded like lugnuts being removed from a tire between every firework - vrrrrOOOOM), before ending the night with more Cookout shakes!

 -- POSTED BY COLLEEN