Off to the Races!
Last weekend, Paula and I went to our first-ever NASCAR race. It was the Ameriquest 300 held at the California Speedway on Saturday, September 2.
My company sponsors one of the racing teams and we had a couple cars in this race, so we were given free tickets. I also invited our friends Audrey and Aaron and we all agreed that it was a lot more fun than we could’ve ever imagined!
We arrived at the racetrack around 5:00p and headed to the “Chalet Village” which is a special tent area for the sponsors. They fed us burgers, hotdogs, and other snacks.
After we ate, we walked around right outside the grandstands. It was cool because it was basically like a street fair. There were a bunch of vendors, food stands, games, and a stage where Crossfade was playing:
The girls had to see the sea lions, which happened to be all the way at the other end of the lot. I really didn’t understand why they had sea lions there, but they did:
We also got to see one of ours cars on display:
Since the race was about to start soon, we went to find our seats. Thinking that we would have awesome seats because my company is a sponsor, we were surprised to find ourselves way out to one side and almost at the top of the grandstands.
Even more confusing was the fact that our section began to fill up before any other part of the stands and ended up being the most crowded even though there were sections toward the front-and-center that appeared completely bare!
We eventually discovered that the seats we had were the best seats in the house because we were right between the pit lane exit and turn 1. Plus, we could also see the back stretch:
The start of the race was nothing short of incredible. The sound of the engines roaring made me want to remove the muffler off of my SVT Cobra. It was LOUD! 
Prior to the race, we talked about leaving early beacause we heard the the race consisted of 150 laps with each lap being 2 miles and could last about three hours. Could we really watch a bunch of cars making left turns for three hours?
We sure could… and we sure did! We watched just about every single lap!
Paula also happened to sit next to a NASCAR guru, so we quickly learned exactly what was going on during the race.
The scenery didn’t hurt either:
We did end up wandering around and making our way up to the front row, but the cars went by so fast that we couldn’t really tell what was going on:
The race came down to the last turn on the last lap when one of the two cars battling it out ran out of gas!
I don’t even know who won, but he had a great time entertaining the crowd with some serious burn-outs!
All in all, it was a great time and I’m glad that we were all able to experience it together. I would definitely go to another NASCAR event.
There are some more pics of our NASCAR day that you may view in our photo gallery, if you wish.
Shout out to Audrey and Aaron! Thanks for coming with us!
its cousin brian!!!!!!
Comment by brian | November 24, 2006