The sun shown bright.  The temperature: a balmy 96 degrees.  The track temperature over 130 degrees.  A nice crowd.  They were playing the national anthem just before the feature races started.  I was sitting on the inside pole, a gift and the only advantage I was given as I'd never done this before. It took three jars of vasoline to get me into this little go-cart. I was dressed in my silky Jeff Gordon pajamas, the closest thing to a racing suit I could find.  I wore a black nylon Birmingham Southern warmup jacket (a leftover from Jason's college athletics career) and two rubber gloves to give me a little protection from flying dirt as I expected to be behind most of the way.  I'd also donned a football helmet since I'm too cheap to spend $249 on a racing helmet for my one race career.  The butterflys were lodged somewhere between my throat and lower unmentionable areas.  Frankly, I was scared to death. One warmup lap, nice and slow.  And then the checked flag. Andy, as expected took off like a maniac.  I couldn't find the accelerator. He was turning laps at 86 mph.  I hit a top sped of 35.  In ten laps, he lapped me nine times. And then the checkered flag again. I'd made it without crashing or making a complete fool out of myself. About then, the alarm clock went off and I had to wake Tank up to get his shower and start the day. Actually, we had a pretty good day at Amelia Raceway.  Things there are definetly going in a positive direction and after a one week layoff for the VDKA Race at Capital City next Saturday, its straight thru including a huge money race on Septemtber 13 when they are expecting 400 carts from all over the east coast and the VDKA Race on September 20.  Just to complicate things, I also have JMU football games both days.  We've already started planning how to handle that.  Maybe a helicopter? Tank and I handled the auction on Friday and Peggy joined us at Amelia on Saturday.  Tank will be going on tour starting Monday as he will be doing Walmarts for something like 12 out of the next 13 days. Speaking of football season, Big Red took a disappointing blow this week as I was informed by the Sodexho folks at Liberty that they are going to start doing their own funnel cakes and other items like cotton candy and therefore won't be using several of the contract vendors any more.  We'd been asked to set up on both sides of the stadium this year to eliminate our long lines, had trained a staff of ten, purchased equipment and another vehicle for transporting the extra stuff.  I hope they aren't making a mistake.  Va Tech tried this a couple of years ago and went to a frozen product.  We get complaints all of the time about their funnel cakes.  The new folks at RIR did everything they could to get rid of the contract vendors and while they make a little more money, they're losing product quality and service to their customers.  From what I've seen and heard, that's not working well either.  The other problem is that it takes a little expertise to deal with the intricacies of funnel cake batter because it changes constantly due to temperature, humidity and sunlight.  I hope they can come up with a quality product as we had a lot of very happy customers at Liberty and I'd hate to see that go away.  I wish them well in their efforts but I am really disappointed. Thankfully, we're busy enough that I'll still be using Tank and his crew at other venues. So much for now.  Maybe I can have another good dream.