Day 17 - Bristol

Another decent nights sleep in the tent and up for breakfast about 6am. Was going to shower then head off to Starbucks again to upload the blog page to the free WiFi, however there was a 30 metre queue waiting at the door of the shower room. So I decided to just drive to Starbucks and take my chances when I got back to the campground.

Stayed at Starbucks for about 3 hours, hopefully if you look backwards at some of the previous pages you will see that I have added photos from present back to Day 11. Hopefully I will get a chance to do some more of them tomorrow.

I went to a local diner to get lunch and then headed back to the campground, the traffic slowed up about 2 miles from the track and it took about 20 minutes to go the last two miles. I assume it will be even worse tomorrow.

There was no queue for the showers so I got straight in and cleaned up. Driving back to my tent there was quite a few extra people at the campground and a lot more tents up. I think a lot of people have the Friday off work and are coming for the two nights of racing.

By now it was about 4pm so I grabbed my backpack and headed for the track. I had to pick up my tickets for both nights racing and was able to do this quite easily at a ticket window. On entering the track I got some drinks and made my way up to the seat. I had booked a seat in the Junior Johnson Stand. All the areas are named after Nascar drivers. I picked this area to sit in after reading reports of other peoples experiences at the track. It is an individual plastic seat with a back and with metal arm dividers between the seats. Also it is on the western side of the track so the sun is behind and blocked by the roof of the stand while it is still daylight.

By the time I got in they were running the final qualifying for the Nationalwide series was being conducted. This is the main support race for the Nascar race and will run later tonight.

Following this was the final qualifying for the Nascar race. Cars come out onto the track individually and have two timed laps to qualify their best time. Marcos Ambrose, the Australian who races in the series, did his two laps and posted the fastest time until then. The photo below is of him qualifying.

Unfortunately there were still about 14 cars to qualify after him and he ended up qualifying 11th. His time was one tenth of a second slower than the pole position winner Ryan Newman.

That meant 9 other drivers qualified within that one tenth of a second gap. How close is that. In fact all 46 qualifiers finished within eight tenths of a second of the pole.

Following this was the running of the Nationwide Race. All the drivers were introduced to the crowd and driven around the track in pickup trucks. After the national Anthem was sung the race got underway

and there were only 4 yellow flag stoppages during the 250 laps of the race. One of them was caused by this spin out on the start of the main straight.

The lead changed I think about 5 times with the eventual winner Kyle Busch won by 0.019 seconds from his team mate Joey Logarno. It was neck and neck racing for the last 10 laps between these two and the crowd were really into the racing. It was Kyle Busch 50th win in Nationwide Cup racing taking ahead of another driver Mark Martin who has 49 wins.

I really enjoyed the racing and it was good to be able to listen to different perspectives on the scanner I had hired for the weekend.

As the crowd left the track it was very packed heading for the exits but the people moved along o.k. and it was a quick walk back to the campsite. I have a new neighbour as the spare space next to my tent was filled when I got back. I met the two people staying there they live about a 2 hour drive from the track in Virginia. We sat talking for about an hour before I went off to the tent about midnight to get to sleep.