AFH El Monte Blog
Sonoma to Denver

Dan, Simba, Gizmo and I left early Monday morning after a very unhappy day of racing in Sonoma, CA. We struggled in qualifying and after two lost runs and watching the video many times, we realized I was mistakenly driving to the left each run, regardless of the lane, and checked my steering alignment, made an adjustment, and were back on track. Unfortunately we didn’t end up qualified as well as we wanted and ran my teammate and brother in law Robert Hight first round. My Castrol GTX Ford Mustang made a really good run, one of the best in the session, yet Robert and his Auto Club team made an amazing run and we were out early again. It’s hard to not get frustrated yet it is little things biting us, like the steering issue. It seems there are a million ways to lose a race and only one way to win it.

It was good to get back on the road in our El Monte RV, and I really feel we’ve gotten the hang of this motor home thing, and have a routine, with a morning cleanup of the place when we get up, and watching a movie with the cats every night. One of the coolest things about staying in a motor home at all of these beautiful places is that at night we can turn off the generator, open all the windows and get a nice breeze right through the place. The cats love that too!

We stopped and spent the night at an RV Resort in Park City, Utah and it was so much fun! I have never been there before, but Dan had, when he ran a match race years ago with Dean Skuza, and let me just say that if you ever get a chance to visit this cute town, you should! We parked and got set up Monday night and early Tuesday we were up and cleaning and doing all of our laundry, so we could get out and enjoy our day. We took a taxi over to Main Street Park City and spent the day shopping, walking around town, and even took a ski lift up and over the hill and got some great pictures of the valleys of Utah! We also found a shop that sold only hot sauce and salsa and stocked up since Dan and I use hot sauce on everything! That evening we had dinner at a little Italian restaurant out on the patio called Cisero’s and had some of the best Italian food we’d ever had!

The next morning we continued our journey to Denver, Colorado, the final race of the Western Swing. We really hope to finally turn things around this weekend. The biggest challenge of this weekend’s race is the change in altitude, which means everything about our runs will be different. Maybe this will be a good chance to break the bad luck cycle we’ve been in. I have a wonderful team and a great car and I feel really confident that we will get ourselves a win before this summer is over. I hope to make this a reality here at the Mile High Nationals.