“What’s your plan?”  It’s a question that gets asked many times throughout the winter.  Everyone in racing has a plan.  And it’s amazing how much the plan changes during the winter.  At the end of the racing season, your broke, tired, and don’t want to see a race car until after the New Year.   Then you see people over the holidays, or at the racing swap meets, and the question gets asked: “What’s your plan for next year.”  You get the team together and talk about how great next year will be…we know what we did wrong last year and that won’t happen this year.  The excitement builds and here we go again. 

Our plan for next year has changed weekly this winter.  As last season ended, our plan was to build a new car for the 2010 season.  Then we learned that we had to move out of Tom Matthew’s shop at the end of September.  We moved into a corner of Fred Hall’s auto body repair business and spent a couple of months setting up a race shop there.  We realized we wouldn’t have time for the new car, so we decided to start the season with the old one.  Then, a couple of week ago, Fred told us that he is restructuring the foot print of his business, and the space we are in will no longer be available.

When you go racing, there are a few very important items you need in order to do so.  Things like a shop, truck, welder, pit cart, trailer, etc.  I had none of this stuff when I started and still don’t have a lot of it.  There have been a bunch of people who have been very kind to me and let me beg, borrow and steal the things that have gotten me this far.  But it’s time face the fact that we can’t go on this way.  So our team’s plan is this: we are going to slow down substantially, save our money, buy some land and build a shop with the things we need in it for a proper race team.  That may mean we race only a couple time during the next 2-3 years.  But we will be much better prepared to race after that.  At least that is the plan for now.