Pit Crew

High quality pit crew.

What a fantastic weekend. For the first time ever I was able to bring one of my kids on a racing trip with me, and it was a pretty special one. A few months ago while rallycrossing with the local group I met a really nice guy who usually rallycrosses in Louisiana. He was over playing with us as a way to spread good will and to invite us to come drive with him and the loony rallycrossers from the New Orleans area. An event finally came up that I could attend and I got the OK to bring my oldest daughter.
Most of my racing trips are just day trips. The drives to and from are a couple of hours at most and I'm usually home by bed time. New Orleans is 7 hours away though, and adding 14 hours of drive time to a full day of playing in the dirt was a little beyond what I thought I could do. I talked to my wife and we decided that it would be a super special daddy-daughter weekend if we were to drive to New Orleans and stay overnight in a hotel and then race the next day. We would get a lot of time together to talk without having to fight for attention with three other siblings. That's what we did, and it was great.

Happy girl and a fun weekend.

The only downside to the weekend was the four days of rain leading up to the event. The ground the course was on was muddy and slippery and pretty much un-raceable. The best you could hope for was to make it through the course without getting stuck, which not everyone did. Cars got stuck and cars broke and none of the driving was particularly fun. It was a race weekend, and the racing wasn't great, but the weekend still was. We changed tires together and my daughter was able to ride along with me when it was time for me to make my runs and we had a ton of time to just hang out. We were able to talk cars for the first time ever, which was a pretty cool thing to do. In one weekend she's gone from identifying cars only by color to being able to tell a Mustang from a Camaro and being able to tell you why it's important to tighten lug nuts in a star pattern. Not bad for a ten year old girl who loves sparkly things.
Like I said, it was a great weekend. I'm already checking the race schedule to figure out when we can do it again, and trying to figure out how I'm going to be able to give everyone a turn going on race weekends with daddy when they're all big enough. I can't wait until they can drive.