Saturday, August 6, 2011

Pocono: Day 2

Today was Day 2 of the race weekend at Pocono Raceway.  The schedule for today included Truck and Cup Series Qualifying, then the Camping World Truck Series and ARCA Race.  After rolling out of bed and heading down to breakfast, we saw something cool.  As we were eating breakfast, the crew for Ricky Carmichael's Truck started coming in for breakfast.  There were Monster logos everywhere!!

We finally got on the road, and headed to the track.  There were a lot more people on the road today than yesterday.  I figure a lot of people came in yesterday, due to the fact that there wasn't any real racing on the track.  We still got there in about the same amount of time, but we had to park a little farther away.  As soon as we got there, the first Truck roared onto the track for Truck Series qualifying.  My mom and I wanted to watch both qualifying sessions from Pit Road, so we headed down there.

Mark Martin straps in to the 32 Exide Batteries Truck.
 We found the 32 Truck and followed it all the way down pit road.  Oh, and remember those Mark Martin fans we saw at the Truck Autograph Session yesterday?  Well, they followed the truck down pit road too.  We made it a kind of Mark Martin/Twitter party. (You can follow him @GregHo329)  When Truck qualifying was over, it was time for Cup qualifying to start.  We did the same thing, followed the 5 car all the way down pit road.

The Number 5 GoDaddy.com Chevy sits on pit road.
 As he was about to make his lap, we moved back up to the other end of pit road so we could see him at the start/finish line.  Its a good thing we went up when we did, because eventual pole sitter Joey Logano was walking down signing for fans!  He became the first (and so far, only) driver to sign the new hat I got for today!  We stayed up there to see if anyone could knock Joey off the pole, and no one did.  The funniest part was when the scoring pylon said Kurt Busch ran a lap of 179 mph, when in actuality he only ran a lap of 171 mph.   Joey Logano, to my knowledge, was the only driver to break the 172 mph barrier.

Then we went and found some seats for the Truck race.  We were sitting right at the start/finish line, surprisingly no one took those seats.  I was tweeting in-car audio from Mark Martin and the 32 team, and he seemed to have problems shifting.  It started to drizzle a little as they started racing, but nothing major.  Then, with 17 laps into the 50 lap race, the rain started coming down.  And as of right now (9:23) it hasn't stopped.  It was about 2:00 when it started to rain, and everyone ran for cover.  As tweets from Bob Pockrass (@bobpockrass) rolled in, the outlook wasn't looking good.  At around 2:45, we decided to leave the track.  With our hotel only being 30 minutes away, if they started to dry the track, we would have been able to get back to the track to see the race restart. 

This was the makeshift flag stand.  It doesn't look too sturdy.
 At around 5:30, they officially postponed the race.  The Truck race will be run tomorrow at 9 a.m., with the ARCA Race to follow.  The Cup race will start at the scheduled time, so if the ARCA race isn't over, I'm not sure what they'll do.  After looking at the radar a couple minutes ago, I am cautiously optimistic that we'll be able to get all 3 races in.  Hopefully 1 (or 2) of the races end with Mark Martin in Victory Lane!!

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