When I arrived, I first checked in at the Miller Lite garage. The crew was going over the car with a fine tooth comb and doing their individual checklists before final inspection. It took them about 2.5 hours to work over the entire car. While they were doing that I sauntered out to our excellent pit stall (the Miller Lite pit was the last pit by the main grandstands, right in front of Victory Lane with a huge opening next to it so I could get up nice and close as you will see...)
I don't get to spend as much time with the over-the-wall guys as I do with the mechanics, because they usually fly in only on race day. I reintroduced msyelf to the ones I knew and got to know the few I had not yet met. They are also a great bunch of guys and were very entertaining in their answers to my questions for the website. They are pretty stoked we are focusing on them for the new Miller Lite Racing website. We also got a great video with Larry, the rear tire carrier, who walks us through everything they do to get the tires set up on race day. He sounded like he had done it on tape a million times...the guys put a sign "Pit Tours By Larry" up during our filming so unfortunately you can hear me laughing on tape but Larry was most impressed by the fact he didn't cuss once!
We had to book it back to the garage to meet up with the crew so we could finish the rest of the video about the shocks. The inspectors remembered us from yesterday (in fact the inspector giving Luke bunny ears in the picture from the blog from yesterday worked the Miller Lite pit during the race). The guys continued on through inspection and I went off in search of a few more interviews. I was lucky to catch Pat Tryson, Kurt's crew chief, hanging outside the hauler (he is rarely outside of the hauler unless he is working) and he was kind enough to spend 15 minutes talking with me. Look for a blog about that conversation where he was very candid about the car at a later date. I also did an interview with the only female engineer at Penske, Andrea Mueller. She told me how she got started in motorsports and some of her reactions to women in the sport.
The race started off very promising with Kurt running up front for the first third of the race. He was locking up the right front every time he had to stand on the brakes and was sliding around the turns with no grip but he thought if they took the bump stops out they might have a good setup. Unfortunately, after the first caution, he got shuffled back to mid-pack and ended up getting hit by Scott Pruett and it created a bad tire rub. They had to bring the car in to fix it and Kurt went a lap down and never recovered. It was very disappointing for the entire team. Knowing how hard they work on the car each and every weekend and the tough luck this team has had this year, it was just a heart breaker. I did however, get some great shots of the pit crew in action thanks to our stellar pit road location.
I hung out and watched the top five finishers be interviewed on TNT and then popped by Victory Lane to see Kyle Busch's celebration and FINALLY eat something. I was completely sunburnt, exhausted, and at least 5 pounds heavier from all the used lugnuts I grabbed from pit road in my pockets, so I headed home.
Words can barely describe what it is like to be in the garages with hot pass access and I cannot thank Miller Lite and the #2 enough for being so good to me. The next race I will be "working" is the August race at Michigan so I hope to keep us entertained with some more detailed blogs from my adventures in the garage.
As always, thanks for reading!
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