One of the many benefits of Robyn working for Lowe’s is the amount of free stuff she gets, like tickets to basketball games and NASCAR races. Like last year, she came home with free tickets to the All-Star races, and as I actually had a pretty enjoyable time last time, I took them.
With Robyn’s parent coming up this weekend, I went with Frank. Like last year we also had passes to the Team Lowe’s hospitality tent, which equals free food and drink and complimentary items from vendors before the race, and because of this all we spent at the track was the price of parking, pretty sweet if you ask me…
The format for the All-Star race has changed slightly from last year, instead of 4 20-lap segments, it was now 4 25-laps segments, but everything else remained. The race in race had a few good moments, like crashes happening in front of us and such like, in the end it was the unlikely combination of A.J. Allmandinger and Sam Hornish Jr who came through to qualify for the main event. Kasey Kahne finished poorly in the Sprint Showdown, but made the main event as the fan vote…
Now after a little wait, the main driver introductions begun, mostly everyone was booed, Kyle Busch especially, all except Dale Earnhardt Jr. As I’ve said before, watching a NASCAR race on TV doesn’t do it justice, the sound of 21 750+ horsepower cars screaming round a bend is really an awesome sound, so I succumbed to the lure of Flickr video and captured the start of the race, poor camera work and all.
What happened afterwards was pretty non-descript really, Kyle Busch had a heavy foot and took a big lead before blowing his engine, but not before Dale Jr passed him to the delight of many, in fact the place pretty much went apeshit when it happened, the only way it could have went better is if Junior jammed Busch into the wall. After this a fight broke out a few sections over from us, seriously. In the end there was no cautions for the whole 100-lap sequence, and Kasey Kahne somehow emerged victorious despite not being in the race until shortly beforehand.
Then came the chaos of leaving a track with 180,000 of your closest friends, it only took 2 hours to get home. Not bad if you ask me.
NASCAR All-Star Race – May 17th 2008 (Set)
Originally uploaded by FLC.