A Day in the Life: Bill, Part 1

Bill’s Day: Sunday, October 25, 2020

• 3:45am (Eastern Time) – Alarm 1
• 3:50am – Rolled out of bed
• 3:57am – Alarm 2
• 4:02am – Alarm 3 telling me I should be in the shower
• 4:20am – Alarm 4 telling me I should be out of the shower
• 4:30am – Alarm 5 telling me to leave the house for the airport. I listened to The Scene Vault Podcast, Paul Andrews, Part 3 on the way.
• 5:25am – Board the plane
• 5:55am – Wheels up. Played Bejeweled Blitz on the plane. Kris and I have been working on building up the coin bank.
• 7:15am (Central time) – Land at Fort Worth Alliance Airport
• 7:25am – Stop at Buc-ees for breakfast. Get to the track and pick up team lunches from Kat’s Kitchen. Proceed to the medical screening to get in. Prior to race day, NASCAR sends a link with COVID screening questions. When we get to the track, we have temps taken and they verify we completed a screening.
• 8:40am – Start the tech process: unload the car, put the tech blocks in. First station is the ramps to allow underneath inspection. Second station is heights and weights and about a dozen hand-held templates. Third station is OSS (optical scanning station) where they use lasers to measure for body tolerances. We passed all of those, so we headed to the de-blocking station (take tech blocks out and officials install the tapered spacer and the incident data recorder).
• 10:15am – Pass tech first time through and pushed car back to the garage.
• 10:30am – Eat lunch.
• 12:30-12:50pm – Warm up the race car.
• 1:15pm – Dress out for the race.
• 1:50pm – Push the car out to pit road and get all the final stuff ready. In photo below, you’ll see a wheeled bag. Each week, I take this bag out to pit road. It contains spare safety equipment like helmet, gloves, shoes, etc.
• 2:30pm – Invocation, National Anthem, strap Corey LaJoie into the GoFAS Racing #32 Schluter Systems Ford
• 2:40pm or so – Green flag drops and we got in 52 laps.
• 3:20pm – Rain begins. Rain delays mean minimal work (we do have to cover the cars and get any equipment moved that needs moved). Rain delays do mean eating a LOT of snacks (hauler snack drawers notoriously get emptied out during rain delays, my favorite snacks are the Swiss Rolls) and having conversations about things that are dumb, NSFW, and mostly unimportant (unless it is Silly Season and networking conversations need to happen, which it is and they did). We also complain. A lot. Rain delays also mean texting with family/friends, social media, and playing games on your phone. I was killing it on Bejewled Blitz. Raided a village on Clash of Clans.
• 8:35pm or so – NASCAR calls the race. We push the car back into the garage for the night. We leave the track and stop by What-a-burger to grab food.
• 9:00pm – Get to the hotel for an unexpected night stay. The radar did NOT show all this rain for today, so I was not really prepared for an overnight stay.
• 9:45pm – Call Kris (who was asleep) to let her know we got in the the hotel and to say goodnight, then hit the sack. I was tired and grateful for the COVID guidelines that currently give us all singles. I hope we never go back to having road roommates.