Get free daily email updates

Syndicate this site - RSS

Recent Posts

Blogger Menu

Click here to blog

Congressman Doug LaMalfa

NASCAR Fans, Start Your Engines

"The only poll that counts is the one taken on election day."  Not quite, there’s the pole day at Daytona.   It’s racing season, yessssss!  

Amidst all the talk of legislators getting others to do their term limit extension dirty work for them, while they allow Federal courts to do their dirty work of shortening terms for imprisoned criminals, and proposals for new Kevorkian Jr’s are being spawned to end terms of the living, let’s talk about something fun.

At the risk of incurring an ‘electronic towel snap’ from our FR chief, for talking about non-political stuff, I’ll mention what’s up this weekend in Florida.  [I think Jon is out of town anyway, maybe he won’t notice]

Speedweeks at Daytona culminates with the running of NASCAR’s Daytona 500 tomorrow at 11 AM PST.  43 racers have qualified, some new drivers, some new teams, many sponsor changes and even a new manufacturer, all enter the fray to make this a very interesting new NASCAR NEXTEL Cup season.  

Of particular note is during pole qualifying, both of the Ford Fusion cars from Robert Yates Racing took the front row starting spots.  This includes the pole sitter himself in the #38 Ford, sponsored by M & M’s Candies, David Gilliland (pictured to the left).  David posted a time of 186.320 miles per hour, nearly 1 mph faster than the rest, which is big when race finishes are measured by thousandths of a second…this, the first time he’s raced in the 500.

You may recall that David Gilliland last year won his first Busch Series race, [the series just below NEXTEL Cup, sorta like Triple A in baseball] in June, and David was our featured driver at our NASCAR Festival we had on the West steps of the Capitol then.  [see my June 21, ’06 FR post on that]  David was seen as a rising star and later in the year got hired for the #38 Yates-Ford ride, a fast rise indeed with one of the historically better NASCAR Nextel Cup teams.  

We’re all excited for David’s run here, starting from up front [hey Jeff Gordon fans, too bad your guy got caught cheating and has to start in the last row, hah] 
 
It’s just hours til DW, Darrell Waltrip, sounds off the green flag with his "Boogity boogity boogity!"

Go get em David.