Stan's MDTR Blog

Cold sweaty palms and a knot in the pit of my stomach

2011-12-20T18:29:00.000-08:00

No, I'm not sick but got a sinking feeling when thinking what a summer without much racing would be like. Let's just say that I got dangerously close to the edge but caught myself before I took the leap. No, I'm not upping my number of combined races/street rod shows to 25, 30, 40 or more as I had done in the past. The only way I could hope to attend that many races would be to take on a part time job all winter to save up for racing. Seeing as racing is something I do for fun I can't see any sense working all winter to fund my racing. Actually there's kind of a gray area where relaxation stops and work starts as far as my racing goes. Most people go to the races to sit back, enjoy some good food and drink, hang with friends and family and enjoy the action. I keep myself pretty busy at the track running around gathering information and taking photos for the next story. Hell, even if I wasn't writing for some publication I'd probably keep on doing that anyways. My hobbies have always been a lot of work whether it was the way I approached fishing or whatever. I'm just not one to sit and relax much on summer weekends.

Recent developments have made it clear that I can probably do about a dozen instead of the half dozen I was originally planning. I probably sound like I'm a step ahead of the poor house driving old cars and not being able to make as many races but that is not the case. I make a pretty good living but keep in mind that when one is dealing with non-race-fan family it's only fair that every dollar spent racing is matched with non racing activities. In other words, yeah, I can go racing, no problem with that but I have other things to tend to. Rabid race chasers think nothing of dropping $500 on their passion but a lot of people aren't able to do that for various reasons. Let's just say that I'm at a point where my racing has become more of a juggling act and leave it at that.

This October through December is the first time in five or six years that I didn't get a flurry of photo orders. Usually I sell the most photos of the entire year in this period leading up to the Holidays. This year I sold zero, zilch, zippo, nadda, nothing...not a single order. People are always complimenting my work, the papers and magazines use my photos on a regular basis and I have lost track of the number of websites and Facebook pages that they're displayed on. As a matter of fact just the other day someone reposted one of my sample pics and commented that I do a good job. So what has changed? More photographers competing for less business and racers spending less on pictures. There are some very aggressive salesmen who have gotten into racing photography during the past few seasons. I have always taken a laid back approach and been able to make enough to supplement my expenses by sitting back and waiting for people to contact me. That approach does not work anymore when you've got three photographers going from trailer to trailer at tracks they wouldn't even have bother with a few years ago. Add to that some of them even have helpers that make sales contacts in the pits and stands while they're shooting. My approach can't compete with that and the very word "competition" doesn't jibe with weekend relaxation. I've got a very busy day job that wears me out so I don't want my hobby to turn into a job. I'm not complaining mind you but I do miss that few hundred bucks I used to make every year at this time. I've been doing the racing media gig pretty much by myself for almost fifteen years and all of a sudden there's all this competition and aggressiveness. Hey man, I'm sixty years old, they can knock themselves out and fall over each other as far as I'm concerned. Not my idea of fun.

That's kind of the reason that the Street Rods have become so attractive to me. Last summer I went to Back to the 50's at the Fairgrounds and took hundreds of photos. With admission only $12, the Fairgrounds less than $25 miles and only a couple of big shows a year you can see where the cost comes in way less than racing. I had a great time and plan on doing both big shows at the Fair next year as well as some of the community car shows around the area. A lot of those shows like the weekly deal at North St. Paul are free so the costs are minimal as compared to racing. I think that a mix of car shows and racing will work fine and money will be much less of an issue.

I'm sure that a lot of you probably still don't get where I'm coming from so I'll put it another way. Each year after the holidays have passed I have to come up with a racing schedule and a workable budget before I can commit for the season to the publications. I appreciate how important it is for them to get a firm commitment so that they know how much space they're going to need and can set it up with the tracks. What happens a lot of times is that people think it would be cool to write for a racing publication. They imagine they'll get some recognition, maybe some perks like passes and that sort of thing so they agree to do it. One of the publishers has told me that it's very difficult to find people who hang in there for every issue and last the season. I know what's involved because I did it for thirteen years through neck surgery, weddings, the birth of six grandkids, car troubles, loss of loved ones and just about anything else you could imagine. Readers look at our mug shot in the paper and think that our life revolves around racing but nothing could be further from the truth.

So anyways, another simple principle is that I like for my word yes to mean yes. When I look at my budget in January I have to know that I can put in a full schedule and do them justice. Anyways, a little more on the competition that I alluded to. Take the Racing Connection for example. I first came in contact with MRC at the MOA back in 1999 when I picked up a copy at a Motorsports store. There was no dirt and no Sprint Car coverage so I contacted the publisher, we arranged a meeting and it was like an interview where I pretty much sold him on adding more dirt and Sprint Car coverage. Back in 1999 ATD was the only act in town and you couldn't have paid most people to write for MRC or "that asphalt paper" as they used to call it. I plugged along for years as the only exclusive dirt writer and I'd like to think that my contributions were instrumental in gaining acceptance among the dirt racers. I used to be self employed so whenever I do anything I "own it" or in other words approach is like it's my own. Anyways, things have changed, now MRC gets a lot of offers and that competition factor where others are coveting my gig. It's uncertain at this point what involvement I'll have going forward, maybe a more reduced role or maybe I won't be asked back in that capacity. Whatever happens I can be proud that of what I accomplished while I was with the paper and would like to continue to contribute on a more limited basis. It's got to fit their needs though. I still plan on doing a little for the magazine.

I have been giving it some thought and if nothing else works out I may start doing some event recaps with photos right here on this blog. Kind of an online column similar to what I was doing for MRC with photos, a story and some video clips. Who knows, maybe even some kind of podcast and tie it all in with gotomn. As I have explained my enjoyment comes from using the technology to communicate. I've got a lot of experience and it would be a shame not to share it in some small way. Nevertheless, there's a balancing act involved here. Doing all that work to promote the interests of tracks, series and sanctions would not come without a thank you in the form of hospitality. I'm adamant about that, some don't agree but hey, you're all free to do this. Go out and spend a few grand on camera and video equipment, a few hundred on web hosting, learn graphics, photo editing, writing, etc., put down your beer, crawl down out of the stands and show me now it's done. What's that? I must be crazy? Yeah, I thought that's what you'd say. LOL

Plans shaping up for 2012

2011-12-08T17:26:00.001-08:00

I have had a few people ask me how I'm doing and wanting to know what's up lately so I thought I'd make a blog post.

In 2007 I went to 29 races, in 2008 I attended 38 races and in 2009 I set a personal record with 44. In 2010 I was down to 25 and in 2011 I came in at just 18, the lowest total since 2001 when I was hobbled due to a neck injury that required surgery at the end of the season.

There will be even fewer races in 2012 but more on that later. Doing racing media work is for all intents and purposes volunteer work, a lot like a non-paying second job that requires travel and weekly expense. Anybody who has volunteered for anything knows that a person needs to have a passion for it in order to devote their time, resources and energy to it. My enthusiasm level has waned during the past couple of years, no fault of the racing but due to personal circumstances. Going into 2012 I decided that it would make more sense to fit my racing schedule more closely to my circumstances than to take my frustration out on everyone and everything. In other words I had to make my mind up that I was going to let it go. Once I did that I started to get enthused about other things besides racing and it became easier to accept the fact that my circumstances wouldn't allow me to chase races for the first time in 15 years.

I was looking for something that didn't require so my travel and expense so I added some more guitars and 24 track recording software for my computer. It was a bit of an expense up front but doesn't come anywhere near the $50 to $100 per week I was spending chasing races for all those years in the long run. I'm not a great guitar player and I can't sing a note, in fact it could be debated whether I'm even a good guitar player but I enjoy it. My only goal playing and recording music is for the songs to be listenable and to improve a little with each new tune. If I think of it in those terms I will be a success. I have no desire to ever make money or play in a band and oddly enough that's what makes it so much fun. Money as they say is the root of all evil, add money to the equation and it can screw up a lot of formerly fun things. One needs to look no further than some of the miserable racers to realize that. Not that money is bad but I've got a day job that wears me out so I don't want my weekend relaxation to become an endless pursuit of financial gain.

So here's the plan for 2012. Keep the gotomn.com website up and running. I am paid up through next May and plan to stay online as long as possible. It costs me around $120 a year for the domain and hosting and that is all out of pocket. The site still gets a good number of visitors because of it's longevity (online since 1999) even though I'm not doing a lot with it right now. I am contemplating splitting it up into several interests where a person would enter a start page at gotomn.com and could go into the racing section, the street rod section and a couple other areas as well. Again, the site is unsponsored and there's no obligations to anybody so I can do anything I want to with it. I just turned 60 in September and have just under six years left to work. I find as I get older that my energy level for pushing stuff onto a website in my free time isn't as intense as it was at 45 when I first got into it. It's kind of interesting that I didn't even start this until I was 45 years old when you think about it. That's a long time in internet years.

Other plans for 2012 are to maybe do some limited work for the Midwest Racing Connection. I'm not sure how that's going to shake out for me or their needs though. I'm only planning on going to about six of my favorite races in 2012 and the incentive for doing racing media work and the only compensation is a media pass. Is it worth working on a column all summer just to get into a handful of races? I don't know, we'll see if we can work anything out and go from there. I just finished an article for Flat Out magazine and would like to continue to do some work for them as well. In addition to any racing I do I'd like to attend the two big Street Rod shows at the Fairgrounds, Back to the 50's and Car Craft Summer Nationals. Aside from those things I'll be doing some home projects and spending time with family. The idea is that I'd like to pick up the pace of the racing back up in a couple years after I get some things sorted out. We'll see if the sport allows me to lay low for a year or two due to personal circumstances or if I end up getting kicked to the curb and spit out never to return. I'd say that I've been pretty loyal and gave it everything I had but I'm afraid it could be one of those "what have you done for us lately" situations. I can't go back to sitting in the stands because I'd lose interest and get bored with it. Like a lot of people involved in racing I'm not a very good fan.

Well, I guess that kind of sums it up for me. I'm not going to announce this blog post on Facebook or the message boards. I'd feel presumptuous doing that. I'm just putting it out here and the good karma will lead those who are interested to this place.

Later,Stan

Thinking about getting back into the blog thangy!!!

2011-11-09T16:58:00.000-08:00

Wow, my last post was about Daytona and it's rapidly closing in on the middle of November. Lately I have been typing a lot at work and playing a lot of guitar so there isn't a lot of motivation to post on the blog. The racing schedule is looking like it's going to be a lot smaller next season. It remains to be seen how that will affect my status with the tracks. I plan on doing some work for the magazines and I'd like to cover some of the online racing options as well. We'll see if that works out or I just might end up doing my own thing for a while. I'd like to be all things to all people but it costs money and takes a lot of time to chase the sport along with a lot of work doing the writing and photos. I'll be out there when I can and plan on doing more of the Street Rod stuff as well. If it wasn't such a daunting task to redesign the website I'd do something with that but it's going to have to wait.

Traditional websites like mine that just have photos, lines and a message board don't get much attention anymore. 15 years ago a person had to endure 14.4 phone modems, x486 computers and learn html in order to put up a website. Now in 2011 anybody can easily make a huge impact on the web using Facebook, Youtube and one of the photo hosting sites. I don't regret the time I spent working on computers and learning all that stuff back then but it's not of much value anymore aside from knowing a little more than the average person about building PC's, hosting, servers, and a bunch of that stuff. It's getting to the point where the only reason I'm keeping the site running is to host the trivia contest. We'll see if I can get motivated to do some blogging.

Thoughts about Daytona and other stuff

2011-02-21T11:14:00.001-08:00

The Daytona 500 was fun to watch this year. Dave Blaney had a good run and would have probably had a top 10 had it not been for having to take evasive action to avoid a wreck. Dave was forced to cut through the infield resulting in the flying sod doing some damage to the car that resulted in leaking coolant and oil. They had to park it.

The Wood Bros 21 won the race with a driver by the name of Trevor Bayne taking the win in only his second Cup start. Immediately after the race my dirt track friends were congratulating Trevor and saying how great it was that the Wood Bros won. Quite frankly I have never paid that much attention to NASCAR racing to offer much of an opinion.

I've watched my share of Cup races for sure but I don't keep close track of the sport. Usually I'll watch their races up until our season starts and then only catch select events until our season concludes at which time I split my attention between football and the remaining Cup schedule. Not that it's bad racing, I'm just not much of a television fan of anything, racing or otherwise. Racing is something I do on a warm summer night, not something I watch on television.

Speaking of racing on television, what do you think of the Dirt Knights series? My wife was watching over my shoulder and she was pretty critical of it. I'm with her on that one, I never noticed how small of a niche sport dirt track racing is until I saw them hauling to tracks in the middle of nowhere and racing in front of half empty stands. The USMTS is decent racing but I think the biggest thing they've got going for them is the hype and media coverage. I think in that respect they really know how to do it right. On the other hand, a big old heavy dirt Modified will never get me as excited as a volatile high speed on the edge Sprint Car. Basically a Modified looks like a Late Model that they forgot to put the nose piece on. Heavy, wide, slower and not as exciting as Sprints. Good racing at times but certainly not worth all the hype and attention they seem to generate.

I'm off today for the Presidents Day holiday and already spent a couple hours moving snow. When it stops (another 1'-3" by 6pm) I'll have to go out there and clean it off again.

Not much else happening around here these days. I'm just trying to hang in there and save a little gas and hot dog money for the racing season. That might be a little more of a challenge this year with the predicted gas prices and more family obligations. I'll get to enough races to keep a column going and do some magazine work but it probably won't be a record year. Actually, I think my record years are going to be a thing of the past. I'll still be out there as much as possible but I've got a couple retirement parties and even a possible wedding in the family so there are things tugging at my time and resources.

I look around at the racing writers and photographers and I wonder how they all manage to check out on their non-racing family and friends all summer. One particular scribe I know of logged in 160 shows last season. You don't go to 160 nights of racing without skipping out on more than a few graduations, weddings and other functions. Some might conclude that I'm jealous for bringing this up. To the contrary, I have always felt that 25 races per season is plenty. I've got 22 penciled in that are more or less a sure thing and another half dozen that require travel and motels that are a question mark. We'll see if the money is there and make a decision as those races get closer. I've got a mighty nice fire ring in my back yard and a great family so I can take it or leave it as far as getting to every last race. I guess as a writer and photographer I shouldn't admit that but I'm just being honest. I get worn down by the frantically busy seasons, the late night drives, the long hours of writing and photo editing each week and everything else that I do during the racing season.

One cool thing about 2011 is that I found myself with an open spot in my schedule during the "Back to the 50's" car show at the State Fairgrounds. Cedar Lake replaced the IRA Sprints with the USMTS at this year's Masters. Seeing as I'm now considered a Sprint Car writer and photographer that left me without a reason to attend the event. Some have asked why I don't go out and watch some of these events as a fan. My answer is that I have obligations to fill on the Sprint Car side and I have to conserve my funds to cover those events. The pie doesn't have quite enough pieces to venture much outside my main gig.

I believe that I may have lost my enthusiasm for blogging

2011-02-12T15:36:00.000-08:00

I guess the lack of posts during the past six months underscores that point. I've got a few too many things going here and I think I'm going to have to transition from blogging to podcasting in the coming months. The podcast will be on midwestracingtalk.com and I like that better than blogging for the simple reason that I don't have to type. I approach the websites as a seasonal deal and don't feel an overwhelming need to work on them during the winter so we'll get busy on them pretty soon.

Maybe I'll retain the blog and use it for announcements and that sort of thing.

A few milestones, a new direction and more ideas

2010-09-30T19:20:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I posted on this blog. That's what happens when I go racing two nights almost every weekend all summer. I like racing, actually you could probably say that I love it to some extent, but there are other things going on in my life that are starting to cut into my racing time. That's no problem, I can still do my websites and some work for the publications on more of a part time basis.

I don't have anything to prove and the younger guys would be happy to step in and fill the void. I've got plenty of web ideas that don't require so much travel and chasing races. I'm not monetizing this thing anyways so that would work. I can do a lot from right here in my man cave. Stay tuned, I'll be doing some fun things with the graphics and audio.

Just checking in on the blog

2010-08-24T16:37:00.001-07:00

This is the MDTR blog, in other words it began life as a part of my racing website gotomn.com aka Minnesota Dirt Track Racing hence the acronym MDTR. I'm thinking about expanding the site to include some other interests besides racing after this season. Next year I'm going to have to make further cuts in my racing schedule so I'm thinking of some options to keep the site interesting. The racing will remain on the gotomn.com site as will midwestracingtalk.com. I probably won't be going racing every weekend like I have been for the past 14 years. Stay tuned, whatever I decide to do will be good stuff. That's always been my goal, to have fun.

I have been a little bit lazy with the blog

2010-04-18T06:01:00.000-07:00

There has been a lot going on lately. No, I haven't been to a race yet but I'm scheduled to start next weekend. Can't type long, got to finish staining the deck but I'll like to tinker with the guitar and recording software for a while. More to come later, didn't want anybody to think I forgot about blogging.

Micro Sprints Added to Elko Dirt Nationals‏

2010-03-19T13:40:00.000-07:00

In a joint announcement, the newly formed Micro Sprint League of the Upper Midwest Sprint Car Series (UMSS) and Elko Speedway are pleased to announce the addition of the Micro Sprint League to Elko's Dirt Nationals on July 23-24. The micro sprints will join the outlaw sprint cars of the IRA and area modifieds to make this weekend an all open wheel show.

"We are grateful to Tom Ryan, the owner of Elko Speedway, for allowing us to compete during the Dirt Nationals," stated Ron Bernhagen of the UMSS. "The micro sprints are real race cars, and I know they will enhance the evening's program and surprise many people with their speed."

The Elko Dirt Nationals will be run on three consecutive weekends in July:

* July 9-10 - 360 sprint cars, late models, and area modifieds
* July 16-17 - 360 sprint cars, USMTS modifieds and area modifieds
* July 23-24 - IRA Outlaw sprint cars, micro sprints, and area modifieds

For more information on Elko, go to www.elkospeedway.com. For more information on the UMSS, go to www.umsprints.com or call Ron at 612-363-5302.

2010 Micro Sprint League Schedule Announced‏

2010-03-19T13:37:00.000-07:00

The Micro Sprint League of the Upper Midwest Sprint Car Series (UMSS) is pleased to announce an eight-race schedule for its inaugural season. Created to bring affordable open wheel racing to the area and to provide a feeder program for the UMSS, the Micro Sprint League will race at both Kopellah Speedway and Elko Speedway in 2010. Kopellah will host six shows, mostly with the UMSS, and Elko will host a pair of shows on July 23 and 24 as part of their dirt nationals.

"Our schedule for the first year will help the Micro Sprint League bring their brand of racing to many people around the Twin Cities area," stated Ron Bernhagen from the UMSS. "Once people see these cars in action and learn how inexpensive it is to get involved, I know the Micro Sprint League will really take off."

2010 Schedule
May 7 - Kopellah - with UMSS
June 11 - Kopellah - with UMSS
July 2 - Kopellah - with UMSS
July 3 - Kopellah
July 9 - Kopellah
July 23 - Elko - with IRA
July 24 - Elko - with IRA
August 27 - Kopellah - with UMSS

The Micro Sprint League of the UMSS is a value-based micro sprint car organization bringing open wheel racing back to the Twin Cities area by establishing reasonable rules for the participant, an economical purse structure for the race tracks, and an affordable race ticket and fan-friendly program for the race fan.

For more information, go to www.umsprints.com or call Ron Bernhagen at 612-363-5302 or John Morris at 763-923-1031.

Micro Sprint League Rules Consistent with Miniakota's‏

2010-03-19T13:34:00.000-07:00

The rules of the Micro Sprint League of the Upper Midwest Sprint Car Series (UMSS) will follow those of the Miniakota Micros of Northwest, Iowa, and be close to the rules run at Copper Creek Motorsports Park in Superior, Wisconsin.

The consistent rules will allow any micro sprint in the area to run with the Micro Sprint League with no or very few changes. For complete rules, go to www.miniakotamicrosprints.com/rules/

The Micro Sprint League of the UMSS is a value-based micro sprint car organization bringing open wheel racing back to the Twin Cities area by establishing reasonable rules for the participant, an economical purse structure for the race tracks, and an affordable race ticket and fan-friendly program for the race fan.

For more information, go to www.umsprints.com or call Ron Bernhagen at 612-363-5302 or John Morris at 763-923-1031.

What the keyboard jocks predicted vs reality and other meaningless ramblings...

2010-03-13T19:22:00.000-08:00

Remember the controversies of a few years ago? DTRA, Goodyear, NASCAR, Rice Lake was gonna' take over Late Model racing in western Wisconsin and kick Cedar Lake's ass? What a difference a few years makes. The first thing to go at RLS was their weekly Late Model program and now they might not open for the 2010 season if they cannot find a buyer by the end of April. Now don't misunderstand me, I think RLS is a great track and I have enjoyed the few shows I attended there but my point is that the predictions of the armchair prognosticators have not come true, in fact the opposite has happened. When CLS left WISSOTA I went down on record as stating that location, location, location is more important than sanction, sanction, sanction. When people bad mouthed Goodyear I said that I've been around this sport since the days when the IMCA "Big Cars" ran Firestone knobbies on the Minnesota State Fair dirt. Quite a few called me an idiot and got pretty angry at me but I knew I'd be right in the long run.

I've been around a long time, I've seen sanctions and tires come and go and I could see the direction this whole thing was going in. Tracks out in the middle of nowhere were in my estimation going to have a harder time than tracks close to the bigger population centers regardless of affiliation. It's the law of averages, more people and more businesses concentrated in a small area, it makes sense that these tracks have a bigger pie to slice and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that out. Common sense always beats loyalties and misdirected fervor.

I have received a lot of compliments on Midwest Racing Talk and I appreciate that. Along with the compliments I have gotten a lot of suggestions about who I might want to interview and what subjects to cover. MWRT is not sponsored and there are limits to how many interviews I can do. At this point I'm trying to build MWRT from the ground up, get some content out there and get established so that when some of the big special events happen drivers will want to be interviewed. Facebook is going to help with that because we're getting a lot of participation in the Minnesota Dirt Track Racing Group by some of the drivers and people we want to talk to. I'm probably going to take some heat this year because at times Midwest Racing Talk is probably going to seem like it has a Sprint Car agenda at times. Without going into a lot of detail, I do the sites out of my own pocket without sponsorship so that is also a factor. I'm sure you'll all agree that if you're paying for something out of your pocket and taking your own time to do it you damn sure are going to do it your own way. I'll never run banners on the sites but I would consider doing some type of commercials in the podcasts or simply mentioning a business name for a modest fee. I work full time so I'm not in a position to go around to the businesses with a clipboard and business card promoting the sites. If somebody asks I've got a basic idea what we could do but I think as most of you racers already know, podcast sponsors aren't going to come beating on my door.

I think as far as the audio site goes our best option is to take it at a pace I can handle from an administrative standpoint and see where it goes. I'm trying to put up quality podcasts with good sound and some thought provoking content and the rest will take care of itself. As I mentioned in an earlier blog post I'm not making "cold calls" on drivers I'm not familiar with so my interviews are going to be limited to people I know. If you're looking for interviews of Grand Rapids WISSOTA drivers you're out of luck, I've never been there and they wouldn't know me from Adam at the back gate. Not to pick on Grand Rapids but you get the idea, they race on Thursday nights, it's way up north and I live in Forest Lake and work full time in the Cities. Visiting places like that is difficult because I'm not setup everywhere so I never know what kind of issues I'm going to run into.

My schedule is made up entirely of Sprint Car races this season so that's going to have some bearing on my interview subjects. I will see Late Models a total of five nights this season, at the Billy Anderson Memorial and Masters at CLS and two nights at Elko. There aren't any Sprint Cars on the Thursday of the Masters so I don't plan on going that night and the USA Nationals are not on my schedule. As far as the USMTS I'll see them two nights this year along with the IMCA/UMSS Sprints at Elko so there is an opportunity to interview a few of those drivers. I spent the last eleven seasons going to a lot of Cedar Lake weekly shows and still have my connections out there so I plan to do some phone interviews with some of the Late Model and Modified drivers as time permits. Perhaps Dan Plan will cover some of those too as he will be closer to that racing this year than I will. I'm putting all of my eggs in the Sprint Car basket and will do everything I can to promote that type of racing. I'm not out to garner huge numbers of website hits or cater to any particular group of racers or please any sponsors who might happen to think their money buys their agenda on my sites. That is the advantage of doing this on my own, if it was a business I would be obligated to follow the money and that would no doubt lead me a direction I do not want to take this in.

No, I'm not trying to be everything to everybody with the audio site or with MDTR. Especially now that I'm on Facebook it doesn't seem like there's any shortage of daily email notices from the various racing websites. Blog updates and seemingly endless press releases have made it a challenge to not block some of those posts. As a matter of fact, I'm following my own advice on this one and will never post on a daily basis. A few press releases, notices when there's a new audio file posted and I'll announce the new photo galleries. I know how I feel when I get multiple daily email notices from some of these racing sites on Facebook so I'll try to go easy on you in that regard. Think of this blog post as part information and part my personal therapy and you'll get where I'm coming from. Sometimes I just have some thoughts I want to jot down and this is my outlet for that. If you're looking for daily racing content there is plenty out there. If you want to know what kind of bullshit Stan is spreading today you can stop here and check it out.

When racing starts and I've got more to say than I can fit in a Facebook post I'll write it here and announce it on FB and the message boards. Speaking of Facebook, I'm seeing a trend of the traffic on the traditional message boards dropping off from what it was in it's heyday. I think that Facebook is taking over in that area and I must say, compared to the racing boards it's a much more efficient way of doing things. The added bonus is that some of our favorite professional race drivers are keeping us up-to-date on their Facebook pages whereas they would have never posted on the message boards. Facebook offers them a layer of protection that the boards don't and lets them get the word out without having to take any heat. Some people say they like Twitter for that reason but from what I have seen Twitter is a little too invasive into a person's private life for my taste.

Well, I'm looking forward to racing, how about you? Keep an eye on MWRT because I think we're going to get busy with a video interview pretty soon here. More on that later.

Internet radio, blogging and other random topics...

2010-03-09T16:31:00.000-08:00

One misconception that a lot of people have about podcasting is that an MP3 player or iPod is required in order to listen to them. That is not the case, a podcast is simply another form of MP3 audio file, the same format used for music downloads. You can listen to on demand internet broadcasts like the ones on midwestracingtalk.com directly on the player incorporated in the site or download to listen at a more convenient time or location if you own on a personal listening device. Sites such as podcastalley.com offer a large selection of categorized podcasts complete with RSS and iTunes feeds that allow you to subscribe to each new episode without having to check the sites for updates. This feature is incorporated into the midwestracingtalk.com website for your convenience.

Podcasts are a relatively new thing on the internet and have become very popular during the past five years. Today podcasters as they are called can create audio broadcasts about their favorite subject with nothing more than a personal computer and microphone and broadcast their creation across the globe with a standard internet connection. I am a self professed MP3 junkie as anyone in my office will tell you. We're allowed to listen to headphones or play our radios at a low volume so I listen to podcasts instead of radio or CD's like most of my co-workers. I enjoy podcasts because they allow me to listen to a variety of subjects that cannot be found on the radio talk shows.

As part of my weekly routine I load up my MP3 player with a couple dozen of my favorite internet radio shows ranging in subject from photography techniques to discussions about the unexplained to dirt track racing and much more. Trust me, if you enjoy learning about a wide variety of topics, listening to interviews of your favorite authors or are in the mood for a comedy show you should consider listening to podcasts. They're especially handy when you're on the go. I love to listen to them by plugging the MP3 player into my radio while driving, especially when I make those racing road trips.

One thing that I find about podcasting as compared to radio broadcast over the air waves is that there can often be a wide rang of quality. Some podcasts sound very professional like something you'd hear on FM radio but others are so poorly mixed that they're a distraction to listen to. The sound quality might be excellent but the content is a complete waste of bandwidth. On the other hand, some podcasts I are plagued by loud crackling in the background or the interviewer is uncomfortably loud and the subject is so soft they cannot be heard. In some cases the sound quality might be poor but the content is interesting which can be annoying when trying to listen through a headset while constantly having to adjust the volume. What I find the most annoying is podcasts where I can turn the volume up to almost 100% on my MP3 player but it's still not loud enough to hear over normal office background noise. There's nothing wrong with my MP3 player, FM radio, the majority of podcasts and my music MP3's come in loud and clear so I know it's not the player. Another annoying thing I've heard, especially on one particular network I listen to, is poor editing. There is no excuse for things such as several minutes of empty air space or the host talking to someone thinking they're not on the air. All those things are simple to resolve with the right tools and a little bit of audio editing to cut out dead space and bloopers. Some of the hosts apparently have never belonged to Toastmasters because they can be a bit overbearing at times, especially when they won't let their guest get a word in edgewise. Nevertheless, as amateur as some of the podcasts are great content can overcome a multitude of flaws. .

With those things in mind I put a lot of time into editing the midwestracingtalk.com podcasts and trying to get all the details right. I'm not striving to post multiple episodes each week which I feel would overwhelm people with content but to keep it at no more than two per week during the season. I make it a point to listen to each and every one of my productions on an MP3 player to monitor the quality of the sound and content.

That's it for now, I'm ready for the recliner.

Signs of spring in the air, Facebook group and more dribble...

2010-02-28T07:50:00.000-08:00

Welcome to March, the longest month of the year. It's not any longer than any other 31 day month but sometimes it sure feels that way when you're seeing racing results from other parts of the country and waiting for the snow to melt and racing to start up here. My opener is actually pushed back a few weeks from the date the tracks open up so I won't be going to a race until the weekend of April 23-24. The reason for the late opening date is to accommodate my all Sprints schedule, that's the weekend of the UMSS opener at Kopellah and the Billy Anderson Memorial at Cedar Lake. There is a chance that I might bring the camera out to one of the practice nights to shake the rust out. There are usually some Sprint Cars out at Cedar Lake for their practice sessions so I might give that a shot. We'll see how the schedule shakes out and make a decision when the time comes.

I already see a lot of activity on the racing pages that cover racing all over the country but as anybody who has been visiting gotomn.com for any length of time knows, I concentrate on the local racing. Basically I approach my racing as a hands on doer and not a watcher. What I mean by that is that I'm not going to see the World of Outlaws results from California on the internet then sit here and blog about what happened. Likewise NASCAR racing, I'm not going to sit on the couch watching a race on TV and blog about it. Not that there's anything wrong with that, some people like those opinion pieces and that is how sportswriters cover professional sports, they do attend games but they can't be at every game on a given weekend so a large portion of their spectating is done the same way as ours, watching the games on TV. I'm not about to start approaching my racing that way though, I write about live events for a local racing paper so for the most part I'll always be writing about races I have actually attended.

Likewise with my new website, midwestracingtalk.com, the interview subjects are all going to be drivers I have seen race and know on a personal basis. I don't feel comfortable interviewing drivers I have never seen or met personally. Interviewers for commercial sites have to do that to maintain their quotas for advertisers but in our situation sticking to familiar territory makes the content more personal. Last year when I was doing interviews for another site I experienced the irony of the detached approach first hand. I was out at Kopellah shooting the breeze with Buzzy Adams after the races then when I got home I discovered that one of the other interviewers had done a Buzzy Adams interview. Even though he had a friendly style and could rattle off statistics better than I'll ever care to I felt that my personal association with Buzzy (one of my favorite Mod drivers) might have produced better results for the fans. That was the beginning of the end for me doing interviews for other sites, it was a great site and a wonderful opportunity for me but that experience started me thinking about doing something more personal on a local level. Once the season begins many of my interviews will be conducted on site at the tracks with a recorder. I want to do something that puts our local racing in the spotlight and you don't get that local flavor on a national site. The big sites have quotas and I felt that our local content was being overshadowed and shuffled to archive too quickly by the national content. Dan Plan from theracingconnection.com is contributing both dirt and asphalt racing interviews to midwestracingtalk.com so that will provide plenty of variety without overwhelming people with too many interviews. midwestracingtalk.com has an RSS feed and is registered in iTunes for your convenience. We'll be including an occasional video production by Vance of frypanproductions.com so that will be an interesting addition as well. I'm excited by the possibilities for the coming season.

I take the same low key approach with photo sales. I'm there with my camera shooting for the websites, papers and magazines, if I happen to make a sale to help offset expenses it's a bonus. It seems to me that many of the photographers are only out there for the sales and the racing is secondary to their personal interests. I can understand where they're coming from, especially if it's their living and I would never interfere with that by giving my work away for free. Nevertheless, I concentrate on providing media content and my personal interests come second. That is also the reason I stopped actively pursuing sponsors for gotomn.com. I know my site isn't the biggest or the best but it fills a niche and I know what my place is in the racing media pecking order. I could chase the money instead of enjoying myself if is what I wanted to do but I tried that early on and found out that it's not worth the grief.

The numbers for gotomn.com after the first five days of March are on a pace to reach 18,000 hits even though there isn't much in the way of new content this time of year. midwestracingtalk.com has only been actively posting content for a few weeks and is already on a pace to get up to 5,000 per month but that number will increase substantially once the season arrives in our part of the country.

What do these numbers mean to me? Well, I don't make any money from my websites, the 1&1 banner on the sites is simply an affiliate program. If anyone links to 1&1 through my banner and purchases a hosting account I get a discount on my bill. That kind of program is a long shot, so far the banner has been on there all winter and I haven't gotten any discounts. I figured what the hell though, I might as well put the affiliate banner on my sites, it can't hurt. The banners you see on the gotomn.com message board aren't mine, most people already know this but for those of you that don't if you look at the URL for my message board it's a hoseheadforums.com affiliate. They provide boards for racing webmasters like myself free of charge and they run the ads and get all the revenue (and rightfully so). I'm not out to make money from racing or the websites, I look at it as my way of giving something back to the sport. If I could afford it I'd sponsor a car and that would be my way of giving back but I can't do that. The only thing I have to give is my time and the web design, photography, writing and audio editing skills that I have learned over the years. I've got the same outlook about it as the racers, I'll hang in there and do this as long as it's fun and I can afford it. I have said many times that I'd do the websites even if it was only for a couple dozen family and friends.

I was looking at a 2005 magazine article about Karl Kinser that talked about him working on classic cars and not attending races after 30 years on the road. My relative Tom Wilke did the same thing as Karl, walked away from the sport after several successful decades as a car owner. They won some big races over the years and he had three Hall of Fame drivers in his cars at one time or another, Jerry Richert Sr., Scratch Daniels and Roger Rager. Granted I'm not a driver and will never reach the level of participation in the sport that those guys did but I wouldn't rule out the possibility of shutting down the websites and walking away from it at some point. I think websites, graphics, photography and all will always be my hobbies to some extent or other but there are a multitude of things I could apply those skills to besides racing. The thing that makes the racing media work affect the entire family is (this isn't a plea for sponsorship) that in order to do it justice I must commit to attending a certain number of races. As you all know, the expense of devoting oneself to anything that requires travel isn't getting any easier to cover. My wife works in a field that requires her to drop everything and go to the hospital when her customers go into labor. That makes it necessary for me to own and maintain two vehicles on our shoestring budget so that she doesn't commandeer the car before a big race. Even if I could get sponsorship the best I would hope for would be to cover some gas and hot dogs and not the expense of a second vehicle. That is one of the reasons I don't want to obligate myself to sponsors for the season, if we had car trouble or something I'd be dead in the water and all stressed out about my obligations. I don't have any specific date that I'm saying I'll be done but the possibility always exists that I'll walk away or scale back if all the pieces don't come together some year. The way I approach it as an unsponsored hobby I think it's obvious that some day I might have to do that but so far so good and everything is a go for this season. Sure I'd like to sell more photos or have some commercials on midwestracingtalk.com but the flip side of that is that racing is a hobby and the only person I have to answer to is myself. I work in a corporate environment 40 hours a week and I don't want to deal with things like sales calls, market share, statistical information and searching for sponsors as a part of my hobby. I don't have any established prices because nobody has asked but if someone were interested in getting a mention on the midwestracingtalk.com podcasts I'm sure we could work something out.

With those things in mind I'm approaching the season prepared to do it all at my own expense but just like running a race car what I'm doing requires time and money. To put it another way, car owners always run at the highest level they can afford and once they achieve that level it's hard to step backwards and do less. You don't see World of Outlaws drivers spending 15 years on the tour then going back to a local 360 deal. Likewise on a smaller scale you don't see people dropping back down to Pure Stocks or Hornets after driving Super Stocks and Modifieds. It's hard to go backwards but in a sense that is what I have set myself up to do this season. Late Models and Modifieds are the most popular classes up here and my decision to concentrate on Sprint Cars will probably translate into fewer visits to gotomn.com. I'm OK with that and I do plan on including interviews for all classes on midwestracingtalk.com so there will still be plenty of interest. Again, website statistics don't really matter to me, I don't have anyone to answer to but myself and there are always going to be people visiting the sites. My all Sprints schedule this year is kind of a deceptive billing, there will be support classes at all the races so I'll see plenty of variety and I won't cut it out entirely.

I suspect that many of you have joined Facebook. I'm a Facebook member but I had balked at the idea of starting a group and was even kind of critical of them at first but after giving it some more thought I ended up starting a Minnesota Dirt Track Racing Website Facebook Group. Social networking is a necessary evil. On the one hand it's a great way to announce website updates but the downside is that checking out what everyone is posting on Facebook can be time consuming. I try to balance it out just like I do with the time I spent on message boards. Speaking of message boards my opinion is that the popularity of Facebook will cut into the traditional social networking that before Facebook appeared was an exclusive function of the boards. The boards still do reach a large group of people and some people will probably never join Facebook but the overall use of the message boards appears to be declining. I will draw the line short of ever getting involved with anything like Twitter. By my way thinking Facebook is already too revealing and I don't need to be posting my every move day and night. People don't want or need to know that Stan did his morning business at 8:30am, ate brunch at 10am and watched a NASCAR race at 1pm. I don't care to know that much detail about the lives of anybody regardless of their celebrity status. I'll take my news in small doses and move onto something else, thank you.

The weather has started to mellow out with a string of 40+ degree days which is slowly melting the snow cover. Perhaps the openers will come off as planned, maybe they won't. It wasn't that many years ago that no track would have considered opening in early April with many openers not coming until mid May or later. Sometime in the distant past one track found out they could open a week earlier and draw race teams that were chomping at the bit to get started. While typical weekly shows attracted 100 cars these early openers were drawing 200+ and starting the books out on a positive note. Meanwhile the promoter at a nearby track saw what was happening and not to be outdone scheduled their opener the same weekend. The next year the competition kicked into high gear and more tracks opened even earlier so that before you knew it they're all doing it. Well, next thing you know we get a late spring and it throws the whole thing into chaos. LOL Anyways, bottom line is that all the tracks are opening a month earlier than they used to a couple decades ago. Every now and then like we saw in 2008 a late cold wet spring comes along and slaps everyone in the face so that we all have to do a reality check. My take is that at 58 years old having watched this sport since around 1961 I'm in no hurry for the opener. If it happens it happens and if it doesn't I'll just do what I've been doing all winter long for one more weekend. It isn't as if the opening weekend is delayed that we'll never see another race and there are plenty of other things in life besides racing. I like it as much as anybody but I think us old dogs get a different outlook on everything.

Speaking of being 58 and watching racing since 1961 I've been thinking more lately about the "R" word. I've got 7 1/2 years left until reach my full retirement age, on my 66th birthday. It could even come sooner, our office is being phased out by attrition (retirements) and it's not unheard of for the railroads to offer buyouts to employees who are within a few years of retirement. I don't see that happening for a couple more years but it is a very real possibility but I still need to approach it as if I'll be working until my retirement date. I guess the positive side of that is that I know it won't be anymore than 7 1/2 years. There's two sides to that coin, when I retire I could turn my full attention to my racing pursuits. The other side of the coin is whether there will be some intangible that will prevent me from doing so such as health, finances, or some other circumstance. I'll just go on the assumption that I'll be able to do that and let things shake out as they may. The thought of retirement is kind of cool right now but I might be so worn out by then that I don't even want to be chasing races, you never know. Relevance becomes another issue as we grow older when we're doing something like these websites. Are people going to be interested in what I have to say and will the structure of the internet still be conducive to a hobbyist like myself doing this? I see some of the older writers paint themselves into a corner where they're only talking about the good old days and young people don't really want to hear that. The young people today might be interested in the history to a point but to them the racing they're watching now is what they're interested in. There's a fine line between historian and dinosaur so I keep that in mind and concentrate on the racing that is taking place now.

Well, I think that's enough rambling for today. I apologize for not having any actual racing to write about and dwelling on my personal thoughts but like I said, I'm not going to write about races I didn't experience live. This blog is a use it or lose it deal so I can't let it sit inactive and I think of it more as personal observations rather than a racing news blog. gotomn.com was one of the first wave of racing websites in the short history of the internet so maybe there is some interest in my observations on the subject.

Be well and we'll see you at the races.

UMSS Introduces Feeder Program

2010-02-20T12:12:00.001-08:00

With an eye toward the future, the Upper Midwest Sprint Car Series (UMSS) is excited to announce the formation of a new series that will be known as the Micro Sprint League of the UMSS, which will enable potential open wheel racers to get involved in racing at a very affordable price.

Known as "small sprint cars," micro sprint ars are based on a 60 inch wheel base, use a 600 cc motorcycle engine, and weights about 750 pounds. These open wheel cars race with or without wings and can reach speeds up to 100 mph. Micro sprints can be purchased used starting around $3,000 and up, or new for about $15,000.

"These are real race cars," exclaimed Ron Bernhagen of the UMSS. "We are going to develop this program wih the same value-based philosophy as the UMSS, which is to bring open-wheel racing back to the Twin Cities area by establishing reasonable rules for the participant, an economical purse structure for the race tracks, and an affordable race ticket and fan-friendly program for the race fan."

The Micro Sprint League of the UMSS will have a presence on the UMSS website with its own page that will have all the necessary information. Look for this addition within the next month.

The 2010 schedule will be announced soon and will include races at Elko Speedway, Kopellah Speedway and Copper Creek Motorsports Park in Superior, Wisconsin.

For more information, please contact Ron Bernhagen at 612-363-5302 or John Morris at 763-923-1031.

UMSS and IMCA Join Forces in 2010‏

2010-02-20T12:11:00.001-08:00

Since the Upper Midwest Sprint Car Series (UMSS) was formed in September 2008, it has taken many steps toward bringing sprint car racing back to the Twin Cities area, including a very successful inaugural 2009 season.

The UMSS is pleased to announce the next step for the series is to be sanctioned by the re-created IMCA (International Motor Contest Association) sprint car program. This partnership between the UMSS and IMCA will create the opportunity to have consistent rules between the two groups and enable them to race together on numerous occasions during the 2010 season.

"I am excited for everyone involved in sprint car racing around the Twin Cities area because I believe this is yet another step in making sprint car racing stronger in our area," stated Ron Bernhagen of the UMSS.

"IMCA realized they needed to redefine their sprint car program to fit in with what is accepted and popular in today's sprint car world," announced Bob Allen, IMCA's national sprint car director and operator of Arlington Raceway in Minnesota. "Signing the UMSS to be an IMCA-sanctioned series is a great first step to bringing the IMCA sprint car program back to prominence."

A tentative schedule of combined UMSS and IMCA sprint car shows will be announced soon with races at Arlington Raceway, Elko Speedway, and possibly one or two other tracks. In the meantime, contact Ron Bernhagen at 612-363-5302 or Bob Allen at 507-327-8416.

The UMSS is a value-based sprint car organization bringing open wheel racing back to the Twin Cities area by establishing reasonable rules for the participant, an economical purse structure for the race tracks, and an affordable race ticket and fan-friendly program for the race fan.

First blog post since December 11, 2009

2010-02-11T15:48:00.000-08:00

With the exception of my repost of a December 22 press release I haven't made a personal blog post since December 11 so I figured this three day weekend would be a good time to say what's on my mind. My wife and kids suggested that I join Facebook and it's a great way to network but on the other hand weeding through all the bullshit each day takes a lot of time. It's kind of addicting and I find myself posting a lot of bullshit too but I'm a natural at that. Seriously though, I was spending an hour every night after work reading about Farms, Fish and Mafia Wars so I had to start blocking all of that stuff. One thing you won't see me do is create a fan page for my websites. I see some of the photographers and people with racing websites doing that but I consider it presumptuous. Who the hell would want to be a fan of me?

When I created my first racing website in 1997 I said that I couldn't imagine sitting at a computer doing this at 60. Well, I'll be 60 in a year and half and here I am still doing this. I would like to say that I'm still going strong but I feel more like I'm in "winding down" mode. I was thinking about it last night and it's been seven years since we did the Race Show and it seems like that was only yesterday. Looking ahead seven years I'll be retired so I'm beginning to see some light at the end of the tunnel but along with it I'm getting a different perspective on this whole chasing racing thing. I sat home with my wife and watched movies last night and loved it. I've got a fire ring in my back yard that I rarely ever use, more work to do around here than I have time for and two daughters who are expecting around late July early August. I see people who are where I was with the websites 12 years ago that are full of enthusiasm but I've been there and done that.

Certainly doing this racing media (or however you want to categorize my hobby) is something I could do as long as I've got my health, can afford it and it's still fun. When I stop and think about how many races I go to each season it really does put things into perspective. There are a lot of people who are struggling to make it from day to day but here I am feeling entitled to 30+ nights of racing each summer. For most people that kind of dedication to anything outside their day to day grind is unheard of. When one considers the monetary cost and the personal sacrifice of simple things like being around the grandkids it's a high price to pay. This season I have cut my racing to only Sprint Cars with the emphasis on tracks within a couple hours of home. We'll see how that goes and make a decision after the season how long we're going to keep chasing race cars.

I like taking six months off from racing but it keeps trying to suck me in deeper and get me busy even during the winter months. If I didn't have time to regroup and save money I wouldn't be able to go racing all summer so for me the winter break is not only good but essential. Nevertheless, I'm sick of winter so I guess that it's time to start thinking about getting back out there. Let's see, 2010 - 1961 = 49 so this will be my 49th season of watching races. I've seen 'em come and seen 'em go and don't get as worked up about it as I used to. For me following racing has been a lot of work and a big commitment of time and family resources so I kind of approach it with more of a "suck it up because here we go again" attitude than "oh boy, I get to go racing!" My wife likens my racing to my "charity of choice" as if it's something I'm contributing our time and money to and not really a way of relaxing on the weekends. She can see things about me that I can't see so I think she's pretty close with her assessment of my approach to racing. I've always been like that with my hobbies, when I was into fishing I would study everything I could get my hands on about structure and I hand sewed my own portable canvass fish house. I've always been hands on with my hobbies and not one to spend much time sitting back in a hammock contemplating my navel.

Have you been paying much attention to the racing in Florida? I see that Craig Dollansky got off to a good start and Brady Smith won a Late Model race. The Daytona 500 reminded me of a Saturday night at the dirt track where the water truck broke, they had problems with the track and had to blade it for three hours. I guess the finish was kind of exciting but after waiting over seven hours to see it (I'm not a TV watcher) I got kind of tired of the whole thing. At the end they tried to draw a comparison between green white checkered and overtime in the NFL. Did you notice the repeated references to NASCAR letting the drivers take off the gloves and go at it? Yeah, that's all they need to do to hold my interest, market racing like a friggin' cage match. Driver interviews were just as politically correct as ever and with those big sponsors I don't look for Cup to change much. Yeah, if a driver has an argument with another driver I suppose they'll replay that until we're sick of it. I don't get very excited for any type of televised racing, for me it's more about getting outdoors in beautiful weather with friends and doing something fun. I'm more of a doer than a watcher.

My tenstative schedule is looking something like this so far:

Fri Apr 23 UMSS Kopellah
Sat Apr 24 UMSS CLS BA Memorial
Fri Apr 30 UMSS Kopellah

Fri May 7 UMSS Kopellah
Fri May 21 Jax spring sprint Natl's
Fri May 28 UMSS Kopellah
Sat May 29 UMSS Arlington

Sat Jun 5 UMSS NCS (Kouba Mem)
Fri Jun 11 UMSS Kopellah
Fri Jun 18 CLS Masters w/IRA
Sat Jun 19 CLS Masters w/IRA
Fri Jun 25 UMSS Kopellah

Fri Jul 2 UMSS Kopellah
Sat Jul 3 NCS WoO
Fri Jul 9 UMSS/IMCA Elko w/Late Models
Sat Jul 10 UMSS/IMCA Elko w/Late Models
Sun Jul 11 CLS WoO
Fri Jul 16 UMSS/IMCA Elko with USMTS
Sat Jul 17 UMSS/IMCA Elko with USMTS
Fri Jul 23 IRA Elko
Sat Jul 24 IRA Elko
Fri Jul 30 UMSS Kopellah
Sat Jul 31 UMSS Arlington (tentative)

Fri Aug 13 UMSS Kopellah
Fri Aug 27 UMSS Koepellah

Sat Sept 11 CLS JR Mem w/UMSS
Sat Sept 18 Deer Creek WoO

Possible additions:
Sat May 22 IRA Rice Lake (tentative)
Sat Jun 12 IRA Deer Creek
Sun Jul 18 IRA Eagle Valley (vac week)
Fri Aug 20 Jackson Nationals Fri all sprint night
Sat Aug 28 IRA Rice Lake

That makes 27 races with an additional five that I'll go to go to if things work out. All of my races this year will include Sprint Cars in the lineup and in most cases they'll be the headliner. I'm looking forward to doing it my way and should have made this switch ten years ago but the time wasn't right to draw that line in the sand until we had more Sprint shows nearby. Another change is to not spend the entire night in the infield taking photos of all the classes. I'll go down there when the Sprints are on the track or in some cases like the Masters I'll probably get some shots of the Late Models. I'm not going to knock myself out trying to be everything to everybody anymore. My charitable contributions (or whatever you want to call them) to racing are all out of pocket expenses so the tail won't be wagging the dog and I'll decide exactly what I will and won't do.

As you probably have noticed, I'm leaving more Saturday nights open throughout the summer this year than I did in the past. Last season I was considered a track photographer but I don't think I sold more than $50 worth of pictures at that particular track all season. That same thing happened a few years ago down at Owatonna, I agreed to be the official track photographer, took time off work for all their weekday shows and didn't make anything for my trouble. I think you can see where this is going, I'm not a very good picture salesman and it's pretty obvious that the track photographer gig doesn't work for me so it's not worth it to try to hang onto that title. I've deferred that status to others this season and I'm going to do my best within the Sprint Car niche I've carved out for myself. Without even recouping so much as a little gas money from sales it's not worth the time away from family or expense to attend a dozen extra shows just so I can tell people that I'm a "track photographer" somewhere. One thing I've learned with this sport is that a person can do all the free volunteer work they can handle and the only reward is usually that you'll be asked do do even more free volunteer work. No thanks, if that's the way it's going to be I'll reserve my volunteer work for Sprint Cars from now on. I made some friends and had some good times following all types of dirt track racing but now it's time for me to draw that line in the dirt and put my time and money into supporting Sprint Car racing.

I guess that I've just about written a book and really haven't said much about racing. That's not what I use this blog for, it's more along the line of personal thoughts and comments. If you want press releases and rah rah racing talk there's plenty of it out there. Once racing starts and I've actually got something racing related to write about I'll get more on topic here on the blog.

Midwest Racing Talk. I almost forgot to mention that. It's not going to be everything to everybody year round but we'll get something on there when things start happening up here in the upper Midwest. MWRT is another one of my out of pocket volunteer work charitable contributions if you will. No worries, no hurries, we'll get busy with it soon. Matter of fact if I hadn't been treating my back/neck with the heating pad and dealing with a cold and cough this weekend I would have made some calls and got some interviews posted. Hey, what the hell do you expect, this is my 49th year of racing so I'm a little older and slower than the Website guys and gals who are knocking themselves out to be the biggest and best. I'm like an ol' hound dog layin' under the porch, I only move when I have to...

Later,

Stan

Veteran Minnesota Sprint Car driver Jerry Richert Jr. to race in Australia during the month of January 2010

2009-12-22T16:53:00.001-08:00

Veteran Minnesota Sprint Car driver Jerry Richert Jr. to race in Australia during the month of January 2010

Forest Lake, Minnesota (December 20, 2009)

Jerry Richert Jr. aka Sonny, will escape the snow and cold of Forest Lake, Minnesota, and make the longest haul of his racing career as he travels to Australia to have a crack at racing down under in January of 2010. Richert will be driving a Craft brothers Maxim powered by Walker Racing Engines with sponsorship from Craft Differentials, Locked Drive Systems and Des Hargraves Refrigerated Transport. Scheduled events will include races at Parramatta City Raceway during the rounds of World Series and The Famous " Warnabool Classic" which attracts many big USA names and is similar to our Knoxville Nationals. Sonny will join a USA contingent that includes Donny Schatz, fellow Minnesotan Craig Dollansky, and Tim Kaeding, in their effort to prove that Americans come to win. Australian fans are in for a treat as they will get the opportunity to watch a veteran second generation driver who is a great ambassador for the sport of Sprint Car racing. Jerry will be accompanied on the trip by his wife Lori.

Jerry Richert Jr's career accomplishments include ten Knoxville Feature wins, four appearances in the Knoxville Nationals A Main, and track titles at the Jackson and Husets Speedways during a career that has spanned three decades. When asked for his observations on the tracks in Australia Sonny said "from what I have seen it looks like they have mostly what we would consider short tracks down there. They're flat like Knoxville or a lot like Owatonna (Minnesota) and Spencer (Iowa) used to be but they tell me our tracks tend to get slicker whereas theirs are more tacky. I'm looking forward to trying the tracks out down there and meeting the Australian Sprint Car fans. The Aussies are tough but I am not just going to Australia to have a holiday I am going there to win!"

Sonny has shown no sign of slowing down and continues to win in Interstate Racing Association and 360 competition. Jerry competed with the Upper Midwest Sprint Car Series (UMSS) during the 2009 season and scored an unprecedented seven Feature wins with the club in it's inaugural season including the prestigious Kouba Memorial at the North Central Speedway and the UMSS season finale at Cedar Lake's Legendary 100. Jerry's brother-in-law, Brooke Tatnell, a native Australian who also comes from a famous racing family, will be looking forward to going wheel to wheel with Sonny on his home tracks. Brooke is married to Jerry's sister Amy, makes his summer home in Forest Lake, Minnesota, and competes against Jerry during the American season. The two drivers have developed a friendly family rivalry that entitles the winner to bragging rights. Australian fans will have the opportunity to follow the continuation of this battle for family supremacy on Tatnell's home turf. Tatnell sends a sound of warning to JR "better get your elbows up and sit in the saddle as I have not forgotten about you spinning me out last summer."

Jerry Richert Jr. is the son of the late Jerry Richert Sr., winner of the 1962 Knoxville Nationals, four IMCA National titles and a member of the National Sprint Car Hall of Fame in Knoxville, Iowa.

Jerry Richert Jr's website can be found at jerryrichertjr.com

Brooke Tatnell's website can be found at brooketatnell.com

Fans in the United States can keep up-to-date on Jerry Richert Jr's progress in Australia by logging onto worldseriessprintcars.com, sprintcarworld.com.au and sprintcardaily.com

Find out more about the Upper Midwest Sprintcar Series at umsprints.com

For more information about the Interstate Racing Association log onto irasprints.com and irasprints.org

Stan Meissner
gotomn.com
midwestracingtalk.com

I'm starting to get excited about the coming racing season...

2009-12-11T16:46:00.000-08:00

The 2010 racing season looks like it's going to be awesome. This will be my first season since I have been involved in racing media and photography that I will be able to devote exclusively to Sprint Car racing. It was a bittersweet decision to have to cut back to only one type of racing due to financial and family obligations but it had to be done. I'll see Mods, Midwest Mods, Supers, Streets, Pures and Hornets as support classes as the various Sprint shows so the thing that's going to be kind of tough is not seeing the Late Models as often as I should. I'm going to have to work a few nights into my schedule so I can get some interviews for Midwest Racing Talk. I think you're going to like the direction we're going to take with MWRT.

How has the cold and snow been treating you so far? I have gotten through the entire week but not without a few mechanical problems. My snow blower experienced some mechanical difficulties during our recent snowstorm and appears to be on it's last legs. It's an old used piece that needs more work than it's worth. It runs terrible, the clutch is slipping and the chute is stuck in one position. I nursed it through the whole job but it required frequent restarts, careful planning to aim the broken chute so I wouldn't get a face full of snow. Every three feet the clutch would slip stopping the auger so I'd have to back up and go over the same area a couple of times. I'm not sure what I'm going to do about that. Even the smallest snow blowers are upwards of $350 new and there's not much good used stuff out there. I've got a two foot wide snow scoop and I might be able to nurse the old snow blower through a couple more snowfalls. If we get a really heavy snow like a foot or more I've got a neighbor who will come over and plow it.

I didn't get a chance to agonize for long over the snow blower because my car started giving me some trouble and diverted my attention. The car started running real rough for about five minutes when I first start it up. I had to have my wife give me a ride up to where I get picked up by my vanpool in the morning so I could get to work. There's an auto parts store where I get dropped off so I picked up a can of Heet for both cars. It started running like that Thursday night after work when I started it cold and had to keep my foot lightly on the gas so it wouldn't kill for about five minutes. Tomorrow I'm going to get it warmed up, add the Heet and fill it and take a long drive so it gets up to highway speed. If that doesn't take care of the problem I'll bring it into the shop and get it looked at. It's nice when the problem isn't so bad that I can still drive it in to the shop instead of having to pay for a tow. Probably somebody like me who drives around in a 1989 model should think about getting AAA or something. One of these days I'll have to upgrade but I really like this old boat. Probably when the Merc gives out I'll get a mini van so I can throw a sleeping bag in the back for impromptu camping. Challenges can be a hassle to deal with when they're happening but sometimes in the long run one ends up in a better situation when it's all said and done.

I have already penciled in the World of Outlaws Sprint Cars at North Central, Cedar Lake and Deer Creek. It's great to see these guys coming back up into our area and all three should be great shows. North Central is on July 3rd, Cedar Lake July 11th and Deer Creek on September 18th.

In addition to the Outlaws I'll have a bunch of other great Sprint Car races on my schedule in 2010 that I'll be talking about as we get closer to next season. I've already got some potential interviews lined up so it should be a fun year.

That's all for now. Later!

Do we really need Monster Truck/Pro Wrestling hype to sell our sport?

2009-12-06T06:13:00.001-08:00

Thoughts while sorting through an endless stream of press releases, Facebook announcements and other various and sundry rip rap.

Yawn!!!

If I get another facebook message urging me to visit another racing blog that updates daily (daily updates this time of year are over the top IMHO), another press release about some "rebranded" domain that sat idle for a year and a half or another press release about a "new" event telling me I gotta' "be there, be there, be there" (insert echo and engine noise in the background like something out of a Monster Truck radio spot) I think I'm gonna puke.

A press release for the Belleville 100 Modified race in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Belleville (Kansas) Speedway says it all for me. This sport ladies and gentlemen has been around for 100 years. My dad, grandpa and uncle sat in the stands and watched cars turn left on dirt ovals before WWII. I grew up listening to my dad tell stories about the old Rex Speedway in Cottage Grove. There was a Midget track in the Minneapolis suburb of Crystal, the State Fair offered ten straight days of racing when I was a kid growing up on St. Paul's Hamline Avenue and by that time had a history of racing dating back to the early part of the century. In other words, what could possibly happen in this sport that is so new and exciting as to trump it's 100 years of history? Do we really need to be using Pro Wrestling, Monster Truck type of hype to generate interest in dirt track racing? Is it really that hard to get the attention of the younger generation that we have to present the sport like that to get them off their ass and out of the house? I hope not but if current marketing trends are any indication I must be a dinosaur in my thinking when it comes to marketing dirt track racing to the masses.

What about the proliferation of racing websites with the flashing graphics that border on seizure producing? One of the first things I learned with graphics programs was how to create animated gifs that are so flashy they'll blind you and induce vomiting. However, after the thrill of "hey, look at this cool graphic I made" wore off and I realized how annoying they were I stopped using them. Case in point, lets look at two of the biggest most visited websites on the internet. Google, the popular search engine has one simple logo, two buttons and a few text links on a plain white background. Ladies and gentlemen, proof positive that it ain't the chrome that makes 'em go. And the second exhibit in my case for simple websites, Craigslist, another of the most popular sites on the internet, no logo, plain white background, all text links. So there you go, if you build a functional, simple website with an easy to remember name, information and resources that your viewers find value in they will come back.

The fact is, if you want to reach millions of people on the internet you'll make it about a subject other than dirt track auto racing. We're a niche no matter how you cut it. Even the biggest of touring series when all is said and done is nothing more than 10-20 colorful 18 wheelers loaded with racing equipment touring the country putting on a show. It kind of reminds me of the circus or the old State Fair Carnies of my youth, come into town, set up, put on a show, tear it all down and move onto the next stop. That has probably been going on since the days of the Roman Chariot races and maybe longer for that matter.

At this point you're probably thinking "you're not much of a racing fan" and in a sense you're right. I think of racing in a different light than a typical fan. As far as being star struck by the drivers that just doesn't happen for me. I appreciate their skills but as Tiger Woods recently showed us "superstars" or "big shots" as my grandma called them put on their pants one leg at a time. Maybe their pants are more expensive than my $15 Walmart Wranglers but if you're wondering why I don't sit on the edge of my seat wishing for an autograph from some celebrity I think Tiger illustrates my point. In my personal life I'd steer clear of hanging with anyone who had a beautiful wife and adorable children but messed with four other women on the side. If I peeked out my window and saw one of my neighbors burn out of his driveway in his SUV and run into a tree while his wife beat his ass with a golf club I wouldn't emulate that kind of lifestyle. My son has a philosophy about race car drivers that I find amusing. When I first started doing media work I offered to take him down in the pits and introduce him to some drivers. He said "no thanks dad, to me drivers are like strippers, I like watching them do their thing but I don't want to get to know them." In other words what he was saying is that he'd rather hold them in esteem for their skills on the track. I drivers personally and most of them are great people but they one thing we all have in common is that we're all people.

So I don't get star struck by dirt track drivers. I have rode in the elevator and made small talk with our company president, we're over 40,000 employees strong so I guess you could say that in my world he's a celebrity. No big deal, I wasn't star struck. I interviewed two NASCAR drivers for television, Kenseth and Blaney, as well as Schatz, Kinser, Bloomquist and other high profile drivers. I've done interviews as recently as last summer with high profile dirt track drivers and participated in a press conference with Dale Earnhardt Jr. I've shook the hand of Jeff Gordon and had an impromptu conversation with Tony Steward over an on track incident at Cedar Lake. I'm not trying to name drop but I'm simply illustrating that they all put their pants on one leg at a time and I'm not in awe of them. Sure I respect them and do my best not to screw up the interviews. When you're talking to those guys you know that you're going to be heard by a lot of listeners and that's an incentive to do a good job.

I came from a family that was involved in the sport as car owners and got to hang around the garage and meet some drivers. Sometimes I'd see guys like Scratch Daniels or the late Jerry Richert Sr., both became members of the Sprint Car Hall of Fame, so the drivers of my youth were as good as anybody today. The general consensus about drivers around the relatives garage was like my friend and current car owner Ron Wuiff so eloquently puts it, "don't bend my shit!" In other words, I appreciate the skills of the drivers but when it comes right down to it I'm probably as big of a fan of the machines as I am of the men (and women) that drive them. I've seen a lot of drivers in my day, guys like Richert and Daniels, Kettering, Lepinski, Laursen (Russ father of current Late Model driver Steve) and many more right up to the present. I didn't think of those drivers of my youth as superstars nor do I think that way about today's drivers, they're just people who happened to drive race cars.

On the subject of being a fan of the machines I think my outlook on that was influenced by my time on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. I spent some time hooking the planes to the catapult and running the port cat deckedge controls. When planes are hooked up to the cat tension is taken on the cat and they go into afterburner prior to the launch so you're standing a few feet from a plane that's turned at full power with flames coming out of the exhaust. The vibration and power are indescribable. Imagine the adrenaline rush of 410 Sprint Cars (or Late Models if that's your thing) coming out of the fourth turn at Knoxville with Doug Clark eyeballing the field ready to drop the green. Now increase the adrenaline, the danger factor, the vibration, noise and anticipation by tenfold and you can begin to understand what it's like working on the flight deck. The pilots went through a rigorous training program and we weren't "fans" of any particular pilot, they were all skilled professionals. We didn't get their autograph or wear "cartoon like" t-shirts with their names emblazoned across the front and back. A few of our pilots had come out of Top Gun, the Navy Fighter Weapons School. A couple had been with the Blue Angels and almost all of them had flown combat missions over Vietnam. I knew a few pilots personally and they had a swagger in their step and that same eagle eyed concentration that you only see in certain types of dangerous pursuits. Imagine by way of example that legendary glare of Steve Kinser the photographers like to capture while he's lined up for the A Main of the Knoxville Nationals and you can understand what fighter pilots are like. They're doing a very special and dangerous job that only a small segment of the population will ever understand and they're a cut above the average person. So I guess I look at race drivers more in that light, someone who's got a special talent and is doing a job, than something akin to a tabloid star where I want to follow their every move on Twitter and stand in line for their autograph.

Back to the subject of racing marketing hype. I think you can understand based on my experiences where I'm coming from. Yeah, dirt track racing excites me, yes, I respect the skills of the drivers and yes, I still get excited about certain races and seeing certain drivers. Nevertheless, I have dealt one on one with arguably some of the top drivers in this sport and when all was said and done I still had to roll the trash barrels out to the street and get up for work on Monday morning. The work I have done for the sport has been without compensation except for media passes but if you average what I do out to an hourly rate it would come in below minimum wage. I do it to promote the sport that I have loved since I was a kid and not for any kind of financial gain or fame. In part that's why I decided to back off on my schedule and concentrate more on Sprint Car racing starting next season. For over ten years I have covered all types of racing and at times trying to do it all bordered on a financial burden resulting in sucking a lot of the fun out of what I was doing. Fans of weekly racing and the entry classes will probably say "what's he bitching about? He gets into the races free and can go as much as he wants" whereas I'd be looking at it like a part time job. There are other factors involved too but I finally got to the point where I realized that I can't do it all anymore.

I get frustrated in some ways with the current generation of our local racing fans. They think an exciting race is some entry level Stock Car class chugging around four wide door to door at 65 mph. These kids have never sat with fighter pilots and listened to them tell how they shot down a MIG in a dogfight over the jungle or narrowly avoided being taken out by a surface to air missile. They've never had the hairs on the back of their neck signed by a puddle of jet fuel ignited by an afterburner or had a sidewinder missile fall off the wing of a plane right in front of them during a night launch. I'm not trying to say that Stan is this brave macho kind of guy, just that my life experience, the things that get my blood pumping, more closely replicated by Sprint Car racing. Young people today claim to like extreme sports and video games that depict all kinds of dangerous action and excitement. How can these same young people who enjoy those extreme things prefer four wide Stock Cars chugging around in what looks to me like slow motion over Sprint Car racing? I have a theory.

Three generations of fans have been force fed on back gate promoting.

My theory why racing is what it is up here now goes all the way back to when I was a kid in the late 1950's. Back then open wheel racing, the "Big Cars" as they were called then or Sprint Cars as we know them today ruled the area. Stock Cars were an afterthought, Sprints, Supermodifieds and similar cars appeared at just about every track in the area and drew huge crowds. Imagine 20,000+ people packing the State Fair grandstand for an afternoon Sprint Car race and you can picture the world I grew up in. Sprint Car races were front page news in the St. Paul paper where writers like Don Riley covered them right alongside professional sports. To grow up in that era was to grow up in a time when one thought it would never change. Unfortunately, it did change.

Today Sprint Cars don't even appear at most of the dirt tracks around our area. Established venues haven't seen a Sprint show in years and hopefully the UMSS can help correct that situation in the future. Sprint Car racing was going strong up to the mid 70's when I think several factors came into play. We lost two very popular drivers, Russ Laursen and Barry Kettering both at Fairmont in the mid 70's. Next the Twin Cities home of Sprint Car racing, North Starr Speedway, sat on premium real estate and the land became too valuable to continue as a dirt track. A few years later, in the early 80's, some of the promoters banded together in an association that catered more to the interests of promoters. One of those interests of promoters, something that became a sign of the times, was that they realized if they featured five or six classes of cars that payed $100, $300, $500 or whatever to win that they'd draw a ton of cars and four or five pit members and drivers for each car as well as more friends and relatives in the stands because they were classes the average working man could participate in. Sprint Cars traveled from longer distances and didn't draw as many locals, required trucks to push them off, more organized officiating due to their volatile nature and a well trained rescue crew. The promoter's found out that their new formula put more money in their pockets and you really can't blame them for that because without them there would be no racing.

This new formula or business model if you will has helped these tracks operate in the black and for that I am thankful. The Late Model and Modified divisions around here are second to none so from the standpoint of weekly racing we have some of the best in the country. I'm not really against this business model, it's kind of necessary in this day and age, but Sprint Cars are are more expensive and it takes more on the part of the tracks to run a good Sprint show. Unfortunately, some of the very tracks in our region that used to be stalwarts of Supermodified racing haven't hosted an open wheel show in years. The fan base has drifted so far from that type of racing that was such a large part of the history of these tracks that some of the more vocal fans dislike Sprints to the point where they get angry if their local track even hosts a Sprint Car special.

I don't think that we'll ever see Sprint Cars attain the status they had 50 years ago but I think they can develop a bigger following and get more shows if they work together. The UMSS, IMCA and JSTS as well as the MSA over in eastern Wisconsin and the 305's down in Iowa and Missouri are a few of the groups that seem to be taking the right path to generate more interest.

So as far as marketing the sport the pro wrestling, Monster Truck hype is a big turnoff for me. I'm involved in the dirt track media but I prefer to do it in a low key kind of way and let the excitement of the sport speak for itself rather than spewing out a bunch of marketing hype packaged in flashiness.

What do you think?

New interview site and schedule changes for 2010

2009-11-06T05:20:00.000-08:00

New interview site:

The gotomn.com website has been online since 1999 and typically gets 20,000+ unique visitors per month and 30,000+ hits per month during the height of the summer racing season. I am pleased to announce that the Minnesota Dirt Track Racing Website located at gotomn.com has been joined by a new affiliate, midwestracingtalk.com.

Many of you are familiar with the interviews I did for dirtcast.com and racemn.com during the 2009 racing season. Barry Braun, owner and founder of the XR Network, recently announced that the racemn.com website will now serve as the new online home of the Racemn Modified Series. My racemn.com interviews were subsequently migrated to the dirtcast.com website and merged with a variety of racing content from around the country. I am grateful to Barry for giving me the opportunity and encouragement to refine my podcasting and interviewing skills.

Nevertheless, I made the decision after the conclusion of the 2009 season that I wanted to put our local tracks and drivers back in the spotlight. In my column for the Midwest Racing Connection I cover racing in the upper Midwest with the emphasis on racing that takes place near the Twin Cities Metro area. I felt that a racing interview site could be of greater value to the local racing community if it were to focus on tracks near the Twin Cities area of Minnesota and western Wisconsin.

Dan Plan, publisher of The Midwest Racing Connection, will be contributing interviews and video clips which will expand our coverage to asphalt racing making the site even more appealing to local racing fans. I will be doing some video projects with Vance of Fry Pan Productions as well. The lineup will include racing discussion, video clips, pit reports and telephone interviews. Again, the new site is located at midwestracingtalk.com. Midwest Racing Talk is owned and operated by Stan Meissner. The midwestracingtalk.com website will be adding new content to debut during the annual GRP Racing Trivia Contest scheduled to take place on gotomn.com in January of 2010.

If you would like to find out how you can support midwestracingtalk.com contact Stan Meissner at: mndirt@hotmail.com

Photography and the 2010 season:

During the 2009 racing season I increased my attendance substantially by adding a new series as well as assuming a share of track photographer responsibilities at one of the local tracks. Now that the 2009 season has come to a conclusion it is obvious that the downturn in the economy has resulted in a correspondingly significant downturn in photo sales. Going forward I have decided to limit my photography and race attendance in order to lower my expenses and devote more time to midwestracingtalk.com. Starting with the 2010 season all events that I attend will include Sprint Cars as part of the lineup along with the included support classes. This change will enable me to reduce my expenses without having to sacrifice my favorite type of racing.

Even though I will be concentrating on Sprint Car racing next season the Midwest Racing Talk website will cover all of the classes that appear at our local oval tracks. I may decide to attend some other events besides Sprint Cars when the opportunity presents itself but my exact schedule is uncertain at this time.

I am looking forward to the 2010 season and seeing you at the races!

These people are insane and I'll tell you why I think that!!!

2009-10-08T15:59:00.000-07:00

Saturday: Snow likely, mainly before 1pm. Cloudy, with a high near 38. West wind between 10 and 15 mph, with gusts as high as 20 mph. Chance of precipitation is 70%.

The above forecast is for Proctor, Minnesota, this Saturday. The following forecast is for Fountain City, Wisconsin: Saturday: A chance of rain and snow before 1pm, then a chance of snow. Mostly cloudy, with a high near 38. South wind 6 to 13 mph becoming west. Chance of precipitation is 50%.

The reason I posted these two forecasts is that both towns have something in common, they're hosting races this weekend. Proctor will feature Late Models, Modifieds, Super Stocks, Midwest Mods and Pure Stocks. Fountain City is playing host to Mini Mods, Street Stocks, B Mods, 600 Mods, Super Stocks, Modifieds, Hornets and the Northern Vintage Cars. Have fun guys...I'm staying home.

I'm not knocking the racing, I love racing, so this is only my opinion but when is enough enough? If one of these tracks was hosting a big extravaganza the likes of the Knoxville Sprint Car Nationals or the World 100 Late Model race that close to home, yeah I'd tough it out because that would be SPECIAL!!! As a photographer, writer, and appreciator (is that a word?) of dirt track racing I would be there for something SPECIAL. The same old, same old shows that we see week in and week out (forgive me my friends who participate in the weekly classes) are not IMHO special enough for me to freeze my ass off.

This observation does not apply to anything prior to the weekend of October 9-10 or the Fall Classic which in my opinion is a SPECIAL show that fell victim to bad weather. The rest of these shows (not sure about Proctoberfest because I have never paid attention to that one) are imitators that popped up after they saw the successs of the first Fall Classic shows at Alex. Unfortunately what was once a weekend reserved exclusively for the Fall Classic and Princeton National has become glutted with lesser shows that are having the effect of watering down the original late fall races. There ought to be a law but that's promoting, if the guy 150 miles away makes a buck by damn I'm either gonna' make a buck too or water his show down in the process. Personally I think greed will water down and ruin a good thing to the point where none of them will make a buck but that's just my opinion.

I have done a lot of thinking about the late fall post season shows that take place after the 100's and came to the conclusion that these new shows that have piggy backed on the success of the original Fall Classic are not so much about the fans as they are about the participants. Sure there will be some fans, maybe more of them than a cold baby like me can fathom, but no way in a gazillion years will the stands fill up on a weekend like this. When I read posts about these races on the local message boards and see the enthusiasm it gets lost on me and I can't wrap my mind around it. To some extent I can understand this zeal for the sport but in my mind there comes a point where we have to hang it up for the year. I reached that point earlier than some and later than others. A lot of people only attend racing in the summer when the weather is nice, I know because I did that for a lot of years myself. A good rule of thumb to follow might be that when there is a chance you might be driving your hauler through ice and snow it just might be a sign that the racing season has come to an end. That's my take on this whole deal.

Like I said, these late fall specials are more about being an orgy of back gate promoting than an actual show for paying fans in the stands. I'll cherish the memory of the last race I attended, the Jackson Fall Classic, where I wore a T-Shirt until the sun went down then donned a sweatshirt for the remainder of the evening. Sorels and snowmobile suits be damned, that ain't my idea of racing. Not to come off like a total cold baby because I do own a pair of Sorels, a snowmobile suit and a pair-a-choppers, I just don't associate those things with dirt track racing. I used to wear that garb ice fishing but now it stays in the closet and only comes out for special occasions like when I'm running the snow blower.

I'm sure not everyone will agree with what I'm writing and some will probably feel anger and could get downright hostile about it. One's opinion about such things are more often than not shaped by (a) age and (b) their outlook about racing. Age comes into play in the sense that with each passing year the cold bothers a body more and more. You can't go by some of these old geezer racing writers that tracks roll out the red carpet for and put up in a heated booth. Those guys are more out of touch with the average Joe than a Washington politician and probably forgot what it's like to set their ass in the stands years ago. No, you've got to check in with the old dogs who are still down in the wind, dust, rain, snow and sleet carrying a camera and running around all night. No pampering for these guys, we're right down there with the track officials, tow truck driver and in some cases where they pit in the infield the mechanics and drivers. So age is a relative thing and can be influenced by what one does during the five or six hours racing is taking place. If they're some pampered type sitting in a heated booth then they're probably going to be out of touch. If they're kickin' and a gougin' out in the weather then they're in touch and know the score. The older ones that know what's going on aren't going to lie, they'll tell it like it is and mean it when they say cold weather sucks.

Part b pertains to your outlook on racing. I turned 58 a few weeks ago and more than ever I'm getting to be a "specials only snob." What I mean by that is if I go for example to see the IRA and Midwest Mods or Supers are running with them fine, I'll take photos and give them my full attention. I know a lot of the drivers and people involved in all types of racing, they're great people and they love what they're doing. They're the backbone of the sport and dirt track racing needs them in order to survive. Nevertheless, I have come to a crossroads in my racing interests and starting with the 2010 season I no longer plan on chasing weekly racing. I have become a specials only snob and I'm not talking Pure Stock or Hornet specials, I'm talking IRA, WDRL, WoO, USMTS, the Fireman's Nationals, Elko Dirt Week, anything that offers a minimum of entry classes and one or more of the top notch touring groups. My thinking on this matter is shaped by two things, time and money. I don't make a cent for covering racing in my column and I sell so few photos that chasing a bunch of weekly shows is no longer a wise investment of my time and resources.

This is not an appeal for weekly racers to buy my photos so I'll cover their racing in exchange for their business. I'm simply saying that there isn't enough money or beautiful days in the summer for me to spend them watching certain types of racing. If I were a paying fan I'd be going to World of Outlaws Sprint Car races, IRA races, Badger Midgets, Jackson, and Knoxville, maybe a few Late Model and USMTS specials and that's about it. The fewer classes to sit through before the objects of my affection take to the track the better. The only times I would see other types of racing would be as a support class to the Sprint Cars. After carefully thinking things over at the end of the 2009 season I came to the realization "what the #@&# am I doing wasting my time on something I don't particularly care for? Again, it's not that I don't appreciate all types of dirt track racing, it's that I can't follow it all without going broke in the process so I will follow my favorites and leave the rest to someone else. There's too much racing for me to do it all.

Anyways, as you can see I don't really understand all these late fall specials that have popped up in recent years. I'm not crazy about attending racing in 38 degree temps with 50-70% snow in the forecast. That's how I feel about it. What about you?

My season comes to an abrupt end...

2009-10-01T17:23:00.000-07:00

I had planned on attending the Badger State Nationals at Cedar Lake on Friday October 2nd and Saturday October 3rd but the rain has nixed my plans. There are other specials coming up during the next week or maybe even two weeks but I'm not sure. It seems like every time I check the message boards some track has made another last minute addition and is running one more invitational. I can't go by the schedules, I had to say enough is enough and hang up my camera bag for the season. I know for a fact that there are races yet to be run in Alexandria, Proctor and Ogilvie but I'm worn out and need to give it a break.

My last race of the season was a Sprint Car race on the big half mile down at Jackson. What better way to close out the season than to attend one final Sprint Car race? That's going to be a tough act to follow and I don't want to muck it up by filling my head with a lap and spin Midwest Modified that takes a half hour to get the first lap in. I want to keep that final Sprint Car race fresh in my mind.

A lot happened this season so there is a lot to sort through to figure out what went right and what I can change for next year. This season I went to way too many races for my budget to handle and I have to make some adjustments on that prior to next season. As it turns out I attended 44 races this season, it would have been 46 if this weekend had not rained out and over 50 if several other rain outs and a dry pond had not interfered. 45-50 is too many, 25 would be a more comfortable total. The problem is that I have taken on so many tasks these past few seasons that the number of races has gotten out of hand. This season I was listed as a track photographer which obligated me to a bunch more weekly shows and a series photographer which filled up almost every Friday night. I can't do that anymore, something has to give.

Seeing as I have to cut my total number of races down the question was "what am I going to cut?" After giving it some thought the solution was simple. Next year I'm going to put the emphasis on Sprint Car racing. Being a track and series photographer is in name only and only comes with more obligations including rushing home after each race to send photos to the publications. I'm hardly selling anything and I'm not being paid for the extra work so there's no reason for me to continue doing all that extra work up and above what the other photographers are doing.

I'll attend Sprint Car races in 2010 and will also give some PR to whatever other classes are running with the Sprints. I'll still see plenty of racing that way and I don't think those Stock Car guys will miss me. The Sprint Car people seem to appreciate the coverage I give them and thank me, the Stock Car guys apparently take it for granted because they get a lot of coverage here in the upper Midwest. I have friends in all the classes of racing and I'll miss seeing them on a regular basis but I just got to a point where I can't do it all anymore. I have run the idea past Dan Plan of the Racing Connection and he understands and agrees to me covering Sprints. It has to be fun and if I'm out there feeling like I'd rather be somewhere else but I feel obligated by some track or series that's not fun.

I'm not sure how the tracks will receive this news. Some have grown accustomed to me covering all classes and have depended on me to send them victory lane photos and be there on a regular basis. There are some that have come up with attendance requirements and I won't be able to meet those anymore. We'll see how that goes. I'd be everything to everybody if I could afford it but it ought to tip people off when I'm hauling around $3000 of camera equipment in a $1000 car that I'm doing my best to hang on. If I was retired and had unlimited funds I could go around doing volunteer work but I'm to the point where I need to limit the photography.

In other news I'm pretty close to starting my own interview site similar what I was doing with dirtcast.com. If you haven't noticed, I'm no longer doing interviews on dirtcast.com or racemn.com. I learned a lot working with XR and I wish them all the success in the world but working on those sites was no longer a good fit for my personal circumstances. Anyone who knows me knows that I'm low key and like to take things at my own pace. Those sites are a business and anyone contributing to them has to meet a quota of a certain amount of interviews. I like putting the racing on the back burner from October through December then I pick it up again when the trivia contest gets underway. When I can walk away from racing for a few months I feel refreshed and ready to get into it again. Thanks to Barry and his staff from XR for all the encouragement and training they gave me. The experience helped me to get the confidence I needed to do the interviews.

My plan is to start an interview site that will concentrate on tracks around the Twin Cities and surrounding area with the emphasis on local racing. The site will include sections for both dirt and asphalt interviews as well as a weekly racing talk show with me as host and Dan Plan as the co-host. I'm not doing this to compete with other racing interview sites but I'm doing it because I think there is a niche for something like this that focuses on our local racing. That was one of the things about dirtcast, I felt like my local coverage was overshadowed by the national emphasis of that site. Also, I would go to Kopellah and shoot the breeze with Buzzy Adams for example then a couple days later hear him in a dirtcast interview conducted by someone 1,000 miles from Wisconsin who had never seen Buzzy race. I felt like there was a disconnect and that I could have given the interview a more personal touch. This way with Dan and I doing a local interview site the communication will be much better and there won't be the potential for that type of crossover.

I'm not going to be concerned about competing with any other site or about market share nor will I feel the need to sling around corporate buzzwords. No team building exercises, or group hugs for the staff, just some no bullshit local racing interviews done to the best of our ability. All the interviews I have done to date were my personal choices and lined up via my contacts so there shouldn't be much difference in the type of content. We're not sure at this point about sponsors or backing for this endeavor. We'll see if we generate any interest and how well we can keep up the pace. Even though my personal race attendance will have an emphasis on Sprint Car racing I still plan to interview drivers from the other classes of racing in our area. I've got the contacts and phone numbers, quiet a few of the drivers know of me, so we'll do alright on a limited local basis. That's not to say for example that if the World of Outlaws are coming through the area we won't interview one of the Outlaw drivers. We'll be open to that but for the most part on a week in week out basis we'll be putting all the emphasis on our local racing. I think the interview site and a reduced role as far as actually attending as many races will be a good fit for me next season.

There will be more to come as I work out the details.

The Weenie Wagon rises from the abyss!!!

2009-09-02T19:33:00.000-07:00

The infamous "Weenie Wagon" has been taken out of storage and will make an encore appearance on September 12 at the Jerry Richert Memorial. I'm not certain at this time if the owner, my brother-in-law Mark, will be joining us but I want to thank him for this generous MDTR sponsorship. I guess sponsorship is what you call it when somebody takes their motorhome out of the barn, power washes the dust off of it, checks that the tabs are still good for another month and throws a spare battery in it to get it going. Tajmahal it ain't but I think it will get me through the night and that's what counts. A bunch of family is coming out including the annual racing appearance of the non-race-fan wife. It should be a good time for all.

I got into a bit of a funk after the USA Nationals and my sour mood lasted for about three weeks before a banzai trip to Grand Forks reminded me why I love racing. The trip had it's challenges but I was introduced to an awesome track and Craig Dollansky scored his second win of the season. In retrospect my meltdown can be attributed to the realization that we all come to at a certain point each season when racing is approaching it's conclusion here in the upper Midwest. Do you guys get that "now what am I going to do" feeling too? I can't afford to travel to exotic places like Florida (funny I once lived in Jacksonville but now it's an exotic destination) in the winter. I'm not complaining because I've got it pretty good. I don't get upset when I miss a race or two, Lord knows I've seen plenty of them in my lifetime.

The Grand Forks race reminded me what being a dirt track fan is all about and an aborted run to Rice Lake concluding at the CLS season championship drove the point home. Imagine if you will sitting in the Rice Lake concession area talking to Steve Sinclair and Sam Hafertape Jr. after visiting with Brooke Tatnell, Travis Whitney, Jerry Richert Jr. and Bill Balog in the pit area as drizzle forced me to seek shelter the nearest hauler. Turn the clock ahead a couple hours and I'm standing in victory lane at Cedar Lake taking a photo of Greg Nippoldt winner of the Cedar Lake Pro Stock track championship. Race winner Tim Borgeson appeared to be a shoe in for these honors at the start of the season but his highs were too high and his lows were too low which allowed Nippoldt to snatch the crown. Now that, my friends, is an oxymoron of an evening if I've ever seen one.

Racing has been a lot of fun this season but I spent the first half of the year getting accustomed to a more rigorous schedule than I'm used to. I lost the Ranger back in June to terminal rust but she carried me to a lot of races during the six seasons that I owned her. Even though she was old, underpowered, sagging in a few places and looking like she was ready to fall apart I still loved her. I stroked her along as far as I could take her but the tired ol' gal gave out and reached a premature climax.

I got way behind posting to the blog and now that the season is nearing it's end I'll see if I can't pick up where I left off and get something on here more often.

There are a few racing weekends left, it's Thursday night and I'm getting ready to go. See you at the Navy Davy Memorial race.

20,000+ unique visits, 31,000+ hits in July

2009-08-08T14:44:00.000-07:00

Thank you all for visiting the gotomn.com website during the month of July. I don't have any click banners or advertising so I don't make anything from the increased traffic but I prefer to keep the site banner free.

Over 20,000 people visited gotomn.com at least one time during the month of July. What promoter or advertiser wouldn't want to reach 20,000 people?

Of that 20,000+ over 11,000 people came back for a second visit. What promoter wouldn't want a crowd of 20,000 and for 11,000 of them to come back again?

My website gets more visits than a lot of sites with advertising. I would consider a sponsor deal if it was a good fit. I'm not talking about a dozen $50 per year banners like I used to do. I had more of a one exclusive sponsor deal in mind. It's probably never going to happen but I can wish can't I?

It's August, where did the time go?

2009-08-07T15:46:00.000-07:00

Well, I made it into August and I'm still making it out to the races. I've had a bit of a rocky road the past month or so but have made it to all the races on my schedule up through the USA Nationals. I was originally planning on going to the UMSS race at Kopellah on August 8 but the UMSS canceled so considering the forecast I opted to stay home instead of going for their regular classes. It proved to be a wise move as two of the Features rained out after running several in a steady mist. Steady mist might be tolerable for hearty fans but not for thousands of dollars worth of camera equipment. This morning it rained hard in Forest Lake, the ditch is full of water, there are flash flood warnings nearby and all racing is canceled. CLS and Rice Lake canceled early and the last holdout within easy reach, Ogilvie, canceled at 2pm. Deer Creek as far as I know is still racing but I don't need to see a race so bad that I'm going to drive that far tonight.

I'm looking at what remains of the racing budget and it looks like I'll be able to do the rest of this season with a few adjustments. After that I'm going to have to regroup and take a close look at what the prospects look like for next year. I need to be sure of what I'm going to do before making a commitment to the media sources I contribute to. I'm listed as one of several track photographers at one track and as a series photographer. That probably sounds good on paper but people aren't buying many photos from me this year so I'm not making enough to justify the added expense. In the past the only Friday night races I'd attend were big events such as the Masters, USA Nationals, and the Jackson Spring Sprint Spectacular but aside from a few specials I only went on Saturdays and would take an occasional Saturday off as well. This year I have been going every Friday and Saturday with no breaks and that is causing some problems with the family.

I'm not complaining, we all have a limit to our resources whatever our role is in this sport. The difference being a fan or racer is that when funds get depleted they can take a couple weeks off to regroup and nobody is going to notice but for me when I commit to a media source for the season I feel obligated to see it through. I'll finish out this season pretty much as planned except for a question mark regarding two nights that require a motel room. I know I won't sell anything to pay for that trip and it will be tiring to drive back and forth two late nights in a row. I'm probably going to have to find a replacement unless some photo orders come out of nowhere to help defray the cost of a motel room. The unexpected demise of the Ranger changed everything for me. The Merc doesn't have a trailer hitch and the camper isn't licensed so camping at the Jerry Richert Memorial is up in the air. I'm too old to be sleeping in the back seat of a car so that tradition might have to wait until next year.

This year I'm on a pace to hit 50 races and for a person who only ever went to 25 that is a big increase. I thought I could do it but when the Ranger didn't make it through the summer that set me back too far. In addition to the added expense I'm doing a proportionately greater amount of racing related work during the week to the point I barely have time to even cut the grass. Changes will have to be made to cut down the number of races to a level that fits my budget and vacation but I'm sure that's what you all do so I'm no different than anybody else. I just have to do my best to estimate what I'm going to be able to handle prior to making any commitments next time. I still plan to shoot but probably not from the first green to the final checker because there's no incentive to stay down there. Like I said, I'll finish this year out business as usual but I'm way too busy to keep up this pace. I'm not sure of the extent of my interviewing, photos, and writing but I'll figure that out after the season is over.

There are some other reasons for cutting back next season besides money. At 50 races I barely have time to cut the grass let alone do any home projects. The wife and I want to get the house in shape to sell because we'd like to move into a town house. There are some projects that will take a do-it-yourselfer like me all weekend. I can't very well remove a window and leave a hole in the side of the house for a week just so I can go racing. I'm not a contractor by trade so everything takes me twice as long as a professional and some of these projects are things that can't be completed on a week night. Certain adult children must think I have a revolving door and that's been disruptive for my wife and I so that's another reason we'd like to move to a smaller place. Sorry, no room! LOL. My more ambitious than usual racing schedule has also cheated my wife out of our Fridays nights together and that has been hard on our relationship. Having the privilege of taking photos is not worth sabotaging a relationship over.

My lack of success at selling is not the fault of any track or series and I'm sure they would want to see me do well as I would think that they appreciate the media support I bring to the table. I would think that writing for a racing paper and doing the racemn.com and dirtcast.com interviews would be some added incentive for them. Photography is something I am passionate about so if I was restricted I'd be forced to find places that are willing to accommodate my part time schedule. I understand why the tracks would want a commitment and they have all treated me great but there comes a point where I have to recoup some of my expenses to make doing this worth my time. I should make it clear that it is not my goal to make a living or even a profit from my racing photos. I'd simply have to find a way to cover a portion of my expenses for the additional races.

I have heard of cases where someone will win their first Feature and there was no photographer to take the victory lane photo. You'll hear the racers complaining that nobody was there to take their photo but they need to put themselves in our shoes. If they won a race at a track where there wasn't any photographers present then there was probably a reason. There's probably no sales opportunities at that particular track and it's costing the photographers more to go there than they're making in sales. Us photographers aren't the smartest guys out there so we'll go to a track once, twice, maybe three times and eventually if there aren't any orders we'll probably stop going. That doesn't mean we don't like the track or you the racer, it means that it's not cost effective and we we're not going to just show up "for the love of the sport." I think the competition among photographers for a dwindling share of the racer's photo purchases is another factor. This year I have seen more guys traveling hundreds of miles to weekly shows at my local tracks than ever and you never used to see that. Evidently sales must have dried up at the tracks close to where they live. I'm at a competitive disadvantage because I'm doing other things besides photography and I don't have time to walk the pits selling photos. That's nobody's fault but my own. I'm not good at sales or getting my name out there and apparently the racers aren't seeing my contact information on the track and series websites. The links aren't always very prominent so it's pretty hard to beat the old tried and true method of walking through the pits with a portfolio. It isn't possible to do my media tasks and sell photos, there is only so much time in a night of racing.

What I'm looking at next season is probably around 20-25 big shows. Say for example there's a multi day show where this year I attend three or four nights I might only go one or two nights next season. If there are no special events on a particular weekend I will stay home and work on projects. I can do the phone interviews during the week and my regular routine of photos and interviews at the races I do attend.

Every year at this time it seems like I get frustrated and I think about finding another hobby that isn't so expensive and demanding. In fact I have said this so many times that nobody takes my annual dog days of August burnout seriously. All I can say is that the numbers aren't very good and the wife is more fed up with our family resources being donated to dirt track racing so we'll see what happens over the winter. It's hard to really do much planning for racing right now with plenty of racing left on the schedule.

One thing I can say is that I don't have any plans of stopping my website. I've got two free domains besides gotomn.com and unlimited space so rather than take gotomn.com down I'm actually considering adding some kind of non-racing website. I'm looking for something that would appeal to a larger audience and would allow me to incorporate my photo, graphics and multimedia skills. I'm thinking about something that is big and appeals to such a large number of people where there aren't any restrictions on photography or extensive travel and lodging required. I've got some ideas so I might take a closer look at that over the winter.

Later,
Stan

Stan's mid season report

2009-06-07T16:18:00.000-07:00

In may of 2009 the gotomn.com website logged 16,689 unique visitors. Unique visitors means that 16,689 persons visited my website at least once during the month of May. During that same period the website welcomed 25,605 total visits. That means of the 16,689 who visited MDTR at least one time during the month 8,916 returned to visit the site more than once.

Here are screen prints of my website statistics verifying the May 2009 totals.

As I type this on Saturday morning June 27 gotomn.com is on pace to hit over 15,000 uniques and exceed 25,000 total visits. To put those numbers in perspective imagine a track hosting a race with that kind of attendance and you can begin to see how impressive those numbers are. There are many sponsored racing websites that don't receive even close to that many visits per month. Unfortunately it's difficult for an individual like myself to make this clear to potential advertisers who tend to overlook gotomn as a hobby site not worthy of their support. I tried selling ad banners but had problems with advertisers requesting that I change their banners in the middle of the season (the price was too low for me to have to drop everything and redo their banner) and others who felt their $50 gave them the right to dictate how I ran my website. Consequently, I decided to discontinue the banner program because I wanted to be able to call my own shots and didn't have time to redo their banners half way through the year.

Here are the June statistics as of 10am Saturday morning June 27. As you can see, the uniques are currently 14,729 and total visits are up to 23,397. I'm confident that we'll see over 15,000 uniques and 25,000 hits this month:

Photo sales so far this season have been very slow for me. There is no question that my work is of good quality. My photos have appeared in The Midwest Racing Connection, Hawkeye Racing News, the Sprint Car magazine Flat Out Illustrated, Dirt Late Model, All The Dirt, National Speed Sport News, The Cedar Lake Speedway, Kopellah Speedway, RACEMN.COM, DIRTCAST.COM, The Upper Midwest Sprint Car Series website, and my personal website at gotomn.com as well as various other tracks and media sources too numerous to list.

I have had several inquiries for photo cards (aka hero cards) that the drivers pass out after the races. I know how to do those and don't do a half bad job at the artwork. Unfortunately now that I'm doing internet interviews I no longer have time to do the art and must defer those requests to others. The only thing I have time for this season will be standard 4x6, 5x7 and 8x10. I don't have a low cost processor for larger sizes so I have to mail order those which makes my turn around time slow.

My photography skills are not the problem. I get plenty of my photos in the racing papers and magazines and get excellent feedback on the quality. There are several reasons that I'm not having my usual success (I was doing great at this time last year). First, as I already mentioned I had to sacrifice doing the artwork due to the time spent on the interviews so I had to defer my Hero Card business to others. Another reason is that after every race I rush home to meet the photo deadlines for racing papers and press releases. While I'm at home tending to that many of the other photographers are still at the track hanging around and having a few cold ones with the racers. Who are they going to remember when they want a photo, the guy they shared a beer with or the one that left as soon as the races ended? Yet another reason is my timing getting my work online. Only after filling the needs of the publications, writing my column for MRC, answering last minute email requests for the tracks and papers do I finally find time to upload the previous night's photos to my gallery. I commented earlier this season that I would not be posting on the message boards when my photos are uploaded to my website. The reason for that was that by the time I got around to uploading photos the other photographers that were at those events have already posted.

After giving the matter some thought I decided to "throw out all the stops" and continue to announce when my photos are posted. In addition to announcing my photos I am also including a list of the media sources I contribute to. There are some photographers using the press credentials of the publications to get in and I have heard of cases where they did not send any photos to the publisher that setup their credentials or call to thank the publisher that set them up after the race. You probably guessed what I'm getting at by now. In my mind photographers that do that are like vultures out to make a buck of the racers, tracks and publications without giving anything back to the sport. Fortunately there are just as many guys out there working hard and giving their all to the sport. I'm not saying that the salesmen don't do a good job because many have the best photography equipment money can buy and are very good at what they do. I'm just pointing out that they have a different approach that I personally find distasteful. It takes all kinds to make the world go round so the vultures are here to stay. Unfortunately those squeaky vulture wheels get the grease or in this case the photo sales. In my case I'm not shooting for the moon but it would be nice to be able to recoup a portion of my expenses so I can make it to the end of the season.

My racing budget suffered two major setbacks this past week so that's going to make things even more difficult for me going forward. First, the 1993 Ford Ranger pickup I have been driving since 2003 has terminal rust problems and was deemed unsafe by my brother-in-law/mechanic. I was driving down Hwy 61 near the Blacksmith and the front driver side leaf spring bracket broke dropping the rear end four inches and ramming the loose spring into the bottom of the bed. When they got it up on the hoist they found multiple problems that would have been too costly to repair considering the truck's age and general condition. Secondly, my daughter lost her job a couple of days ago and will be moving back in with her daughter. Without going into a lot of details about my personal finances either of these things alone would have been a major hit but both happening together at the mid point of the season are like the "perfect storm" for me financially. To add to the mess my wife is still rehabbing from her shoulder surgery so I'm having to make insurance co-pays every week for her physical therapy.

My son Les opening a cold one in front of the Ranger at the 2003 Jerry Richert Memorial

I've got a borrowed minivan for the weekend and will be buying an 89 Merc Marquee with a 302 V8 from my brother-in-law. It's 20 years old but he says it's solid, runs good and everything still works. This will be a "one payment" car and admittedly will be a bit of a gamble because the only driving it's seen has been a shop loaner for customers. We'll find out how the mileage is (the Ranger got 23 on the highway and I expect this to be close) and how well it runs next weekend when I drive it up to North Central Speedway. Some of you are probably laughing and calling me a cheap SOB because I won't go out and buy something newer. Again without getting too much into my personal finances the wife doesn't work and I maintain a '98 Olds that she drives. That along with helping out family made it come down to a choice between spending my money on racing or taking out a loan and making car payments. I chose the old car and racing over the new car payments and sitting home on weekends tending a garden.

This has been the best and the worst of seasons. The best in that I'm having fun and seeing some great racing, yet one of the worst financially. Hopefully giving 110% in support of racing will pay off somehow and allow me to continue at the level I'm doing now. Nobody owes me anything, I try to do a good job and give something of value back to the racing community in terms of media coverage and some nice photos. Prior to the start of the season I evaluate my budget and try to match my media commitments to my budget as best I can so that I can fulfill those commitments. Unfortunately circumstance doesn't appreciate my media commitments and sometimes deals up mountain like obstacles in the middle of the season.

All I can do is keep plugging away and do my best which is what I plan to do. Thank you for reading this mid season update.

Exhausted on a Monday night

2009-05-11T15:43:00.000-07:00

The weekend finally caught up with me and I am exhausted tonight. The races got over at a fairly reasonable hour both nights but I had to do several hours of work when I got home from the races both nights and four more hours Sunday morning. I did manage to get outside yesterday afternoon for a few hours and cut the lawn for the first time. I was thinking about going out there with the bag on the mower to pick up some mulch left over from last fall but I ran out of steam thinking about it.

I'm going to take the night off tonight and get busy with interviews and getting the camera ready for the weekend starting tomorrow night. I have to check my camera sensor to see if it needs cleaning and I should get my solution out and clean all of the lenses. I've got a sensor scope kit with a lighted magnifying scope and some special swabs and solution for sensor cleaning. The kit comes with a little battery or USB operated mini vacuum that works great for cleaning the dust out of the little impossible to reach places. So far it has been a dusty season which makes cleaning on a regular basis very important.

I'm going to comment on some of the feedback I have been getting recently.

Email: "Is it really true that you haven't sold any pictures this season? I don't get it, your pictures are awesome."

Stan: Yes, it is true, I haven't sold anything. I had three requests for drivers cards that I deferred to another photographer because I don't have time to do the artwork. I had one inquiry about an 8x10 and another about a couple 4x6's and a 5x7. 8x10's cost me $3 each for processing and the going rate is $10 so I make $7 each so I might make $7 this weekend for my first sale. I say "might" because sometimes people ask me to have pics made up and never hear back from them so I don't count any sales in advance. The person that inquired about the 4x6's and 5x7 never replied back to me so they must have gone to somebody else. So the answer to your question is that I haven't made a cent this year but I might make $7. One photo is hardly worth the trouble of having to drive over and pick it up. At this time last season I was already getting multiple orders so I am not doing well at all. Matter of fact, every photographer I have talked to is doing well so far this spring so I don't know what has gone wrong. The publications have been contacting me and requesting more of my photos each week, they love my work and are keeping me very busy after the races.

I have a theory on my lack of sales. The other photographers that put their emphasis on selling take mostly single car standard shots whereas I do a lot of multi car stuff at a variety of non-standard angles specifically intended for the publications. That and the fact that I decided to forgo the post race celebrating and get online as soon as possible after the races to send to a rapidly growing distribution list. Whatever the reason for my lack of success at sales it is what it is so I had to make some adjustments. I convened an emergency MDTR chairman of the board meeting and made some budget cuts just like the big companies have had to do. I cut out the motel and all but possibly one of the camping weekends and will be coming home after all the events to save on expenses. Of course I will hang onto the old truck for another year and I shuffled things around to free up some more money out of my savings. I'm not complaining but just telling it like it is and saying that money appears to be tight for everyone compared to last year. Bottom line, the racers need to spend every last cent on their cars and I can understand what it's like to have to do that. No complaints here, we'll keep plugging away and do our best.

Here's a few samples from Saturday night.

Someone else asked this question:

Email: Why do you only do your interviews at ##### #### and how come you don't interview at some of the ####### tracks?

Answer: See above, it takes gas money to travel around to other tracks that are a further distance from home. Also, I don't have one of those ####### passes so I can't get into most of their tracks. The interviews take time and preparation during the week to do properly. I do my best to give back to the sport and make a contribution but I'm maxed out in both time and budget so I'm forced to stay close to home most of the time. Also, as I mentioned above, I can't afford motel rooms and even if I could the wife is attached to her laptop computer and has all her work on it so I can't take it with me to do my work in the motel after the races even if I could afford to travel. I'm giving 110% of what I have back to the sport but it's never enough for some people. If they don't like what I'm doing and think they can do a better job by all means go ahead. This kind of feedback is discouraging but I have to pick my chin up and let it roll off my back.

On the up side I have been getting some positive feedback from the interviews that I have done. That is encouraging and makes it worth while to take on this new task. I'm doing it to give the racers around our local area some exposure and not for my own personal interests. It's time consuming and nerve wracking to do the cold calls and approach people about this so it's a work in progress for me. I'll just keep going by the feedback and I do accept constructive criticism but I won't take a beating for things that I am not able to do.

I hope this helps to answer these two most asked questions.

Well, that's going to about do it for tonight.

Later!

I am kinda wore out for no apparent reason other than that it's Tuesday...

2009-05-05T17:30:00.000-07:00

I was thinking about doing an interview tonight but I kinda' hit my wall and lost my ambition about an hour after dinner. I'll have to double up tomorrow night and see if I can do a couple of them. I'm still getting used to the more intense routine and have been brushing up on speech training, writing notes and gathering information. Been doing quite a bit of photo editing and working on the next MRC column so this has been an intense first few weeks of the season. I'm sure that when it warms up and I don't have to fight this lousy weather I'll have more energy because the cold takes some of the wind out of my sails. I should have asked Doug Wolfgang how he deals with the aches and pains after his injuries but I think I already know the answer to that. Anybody that followed his career knows that he was always into conditioning probably more than most of the other Outlaw drivers. I think he still gets out and does as much as he can to this day but I didn't get an opportunity to talk to him about it. My window of opportunity for keeping myself in that kind of condition have probably passed but I'm getting out and walking and trying to eat better so that helps. Some guys like Doug had enough insight to do that when they were younger and that sure has to help a lot. Anyways, I see where Saturday will be another 60/40 (around 60 for a high and a low of 40)so it's kind of hangin' in there just a little cooler than I'd like to see it.

I got a call tonight about my photos and that made me feel pretty good. I already knew that my work is good and that I'm doing some unique stuff but I don't try to compete for sales and I don't post an announcement on the message boards everytime I upload photos. You can pretty much count on me uploading anywhere from 1-3 galleries every week, usually the day after the race.

I don't think there's a need to announce that I posted to my gallery. People know where it is, they know my work and they'll let me know if they like something.

My typical race weekend goes something like this. Go to work all day Friday, stop home and pickup my camera bag, change shoes, grab a hat and sweatshirt and head to the track. I go around talking to people, maybe take a few portraits in the pit area and whatever other special assignment I've got. Take photos all night until the final Feature has been run and get out of the track and on the road as soon as possible. When I get home I'll upload the photos to my computer, go through them and pick out the victory lane shots. Send the victory lane and maybe a couple action shots to several publications and the tracks, burn two CD's, one for myself and one for the track. By the time this is done it's usually 2am and I'm ready for bed. I'll get up in the morning, finish up any photo work for the publications that I was too tired to do the upload to my gallery. Then I'll go out and try to do a few hours of yard work until around 2 or 3 on Saturday. take a shower, organize the camera bag, load up the batteries and head out to the track. The Friday routine is repeated again on Saturday night except if the Features are done early enough I'll stop at one of the convenience stores in Osceola and get a 12 pack. Go home, repeat the photo routine (if it's early enough I'll down a couple beers) and go to bed.

Sunday I get up, repeat that same routine of uploading the gallery and finishing up any photo work. Burn CD's and put one in the truck for the track, do laundry, clean out the litter box, grille for the wife or go out to dinner and DVR the NASCAR race if I remember. If I'm done early enough I'll buzz through the race on fast forward to see who won so I can give the wife the TV before her Sunday night shows start. Maybe I'll hang on the computer for a little while checking out results, load up my MP3 player with fresh podcasts and take a break. If the deadline for my column falls on that weekend then I'll put the photo work off and finish/send my column.

This season I'm doing the interviews so I'm getting into the routine of organizing my materials and writing an outline during lunch and breaks at work and doing the actual interviews Tuesday thought Thursdays. That piece is kind of flexible but I'm trying to do two per week to start and will add more as I get used to the routine and doing the actual interviewing. You wouldn't think that it would be very intense to sit and talk to somebody on the phone but there's a certain protocol to follow and in spite of reciting the introduction and conclusion whenever I'm driving anywhere I still can't rattle it off. I have been listening to some public speaking podcasts and practicing so that come around. I get the same panic feeling at the start of an interview that I used to get when I'd speak in front of a couple hundred people. That feeling eventually subsided before public speaking as I'm sure it will with a little more podcasting experience. I think that trying to direct the conversation with another person involved is what makes it more intense because you never know what they're going to say. You can't stay too close to your notes or you're going to panic when the subject of your interview goes in a different direction than you expect. It's structured to some degree but in another sense it's very much by the seat of my pants because I have to adjust. For example, if my notes so to ask a certain question and the interview subject volunteers that information before I get around to asking the question I have to strike that question on the fly. In some cases they may only partially cover the subject so then I might still revisit it later in the interview with a slightly different twist.

And, uh, ummm, I'm uh, ya know, I'm uh, still working on eliminating those bad patterns that we all fall into in our everyday conversation without even knowing that we did it. That is a big challenge for me, ya know? LOL

It has been busy lately and I'm still trying to figure out how to break it to the wife that she's going to have to take over the yard work. On second thought it would probably be better for my health and well being to continue to do that myself. ;-)

Woke up on the wrong side of the bed...I know my work is good

2009-04-28T17:07:00.000-07:00

My work is outstanding and that is evident by the number of photos I get published in papers and magazines on a regular basis. Actually the problem is that I'm not a very good salesman. It doesn't come natural for me. I'm very busy this year so in addition to being a lousy salesman I'll never have time to improve in that area as long as I'm so busy.

I'll just have to hope that some manna falls out of the sky by the middle of the summer.... ;-)

What's wrong with my work?

2009-04-28T04:04:00.000-07:00

photo was randomly selected to illustrate my work and not meant as criticism of those pictured

What's wrong with my work this season? I'm having beyond a miserable year supplementing my gas and hot dog budget. So far a big fat $0 (compared to the other photographers I know who all report that they have done well so far). I'm not sure what the solution is or even if there is one but I'm funded for a couple more months so I hope things improve.

Isn't the sharpness clear enough?

Is there a problem with composition?

Does the color balance look off?

Your feedback is encouraged, please send to: mndirt@hotmail.com

As always my work is done primarily in support of the racing publications and tracks.

I'm afraid we're gonna' get hammered this weekend

2009-04-23T16:10:00.000-07:00

I'm afraid that the rain is going to be the big winner this weekend. It's so darned dry that for sure we need the rain but the timing could be better, not just for racing fans but for everyone who enjoys the outdoors.

If we go get a race in this weekend I'd say the best chance is going to be on Friday. I'm hearing terms such as isolated and scattered in regards to Friday night with showers continuing until at least 1pm Saturday and temps struggling to reach 50. You can pretty much bet that a race is not going to happen under those conditions. I see that Cedar Lake has a rain date for the Billy Anderson Memorial this year and I am thankful for that.

A good weekend right out of the box...

2009-04-19T19:51:00.000-07:00

I took the camera out of the cabinet for the first time in six months this past weekend. Everything looked good right out of the box and the new lens produces some great images. I'm extremely happy with the results. Here is a small scale sample:

Writing about my weekend so far, but wait, there's more to come...

2009-04-09T16:52:00.002-07:00

Good Friday is one of our holidays so that makes it's a GREAT FRIDAY, but for those of you who worked it was good because Friday is always good. Finally it sounds like we're going to get a decent weekend but not before Red Cedar and Cedar Lake were forced to cancel their scheduled opening nights. Hecklers will say "they could have raced" but reasonable people will take into account the frost covering their windshields every morning this week and understand that sufficient drying did not take place and post sundown weather was not warm enough to attract a crowd. Those diehards who would have showed up in their snowmobile suits will protest with the aforementioned complaint but reasonable people with little kids in tow outnumber them and promoters know that the families go a lot further making the bottom line work than a couple dozen diehards. Complaints aside, next weekend's preliminary forecast is calling for more spring-like conditions though still not warm after sunset by any means but jittery promoters with one eye on the economy and remembering the six lost weeks of early 2008 will oblige die hards. In other words, I predict that we will race next week come hell or high water. A fitting expression in the upper Midwest because you never know which one you're going to get in the early spring, hell like temps or high water.

You probably noticed that my blog has been silent lately. That's because I have been brushing up on 25 years of public speech training. My public speaking experience includes addressing large audiences and I am a past member of the Toastmasters club. No matter how long you have been a Toastmaster you're always learning. The Toastmasters has a thing they call "table topics" that goes something like this:

The Table Topics portion of a Toastmasters meeting takes place before or after the formal “prepared speeches” segment and usually lasts 20 or 30 minutes. The Topicsmaster announces a topic or question and calls on several members, one at a time, who give impromptu one- to-two-minute responses to that topic.

When you’re called (or volunteer) to speak during Table Topics, you’ll do well if you keep your remarks brief and to the point. (This is often easier said than done, however!) Try to present sensible, worthwhile ideas that add to the knowledge of others and organize your thoughts into a mini-speech. You’re encouraged to refute or elaborate on ideas and information already presented by other participants.

The challenging thing about Toastmasters was that I was required to speak extemperaniously (on the spot with no warning). That didn't bother me, I could deal with that but sometimes they would come up with some off the wall subjects that I couldn't relate to which forced me to learn to wing it. I left the Toastmasters because I didn't have time to prepare speeches during the racing season when spare time is always at a minimum. I can barely get the grass cut, the projects done and fulfill family obligations as it is without having to write and practice speeches. Toastmaser's is a great organization but it's a big commitment of time that was starting to cut into racing. Anyways, I'm shaking the dust off my speaking skills and will soon be putting them back to work.

Back in 1987 the Traffic Department was eliminated by Northrup King in favor of decentralization and out sourcing. Consequently, I found myself out on the street for four months. I had a severance package and a room full of music and recording equipment that saved me from going nuts worrying about finding a job. Equipment included a multi track recorder, a keyboard with beat tracks, a borrowed bass guitar and my own electric six string guitar. Even though I can't sing worth a damn and am not the best guitar player I spent the summer writing and recording songs to keep my mind off being out of work. It was fun working with a multi track recorder, laying down all the tracks and pinging from one track to the next. I tried to keep the total number of tracks around eight to maintain the integrity of the sound. Back around that same time I was traveling around with a friend's band and helping with the sound. I played guitar at their practices and even stood in on the bass guitar for one of their gigs. I learned a lot about recording but that was before home computers became popular so it was all done with audio tape. Today's recording technology is way better and it has been easy for me to pick up due to my recording experience.

I installed a gig of memory and a 1tb second hard drive in my computer yesterday with no problem. Unfortunately I made a bad decision and tried to install Ubuntu on a partition on the new drive and that set my productivity back about six hours. Grub boot loader comes bundled with Ubuntu so I thought, why not setup a dual boot system because I had used Linux on my wife's computer for a year and would like to master using it on a daily basis. Problem is that when I got it installed and tried to reboot the Grub boot loader locked up and showed an error #21.

I spent an hour trying suggestions posted on the Linux forums like changing the boot order and several other things that didn't work. I narrowed it down to a drive controller conflict on some systems and I saw where people who experienced this problem had posted screen shots of the error code and the Ubuntu team would evaluate the problem and respond. When I saw that I knew I was in trouble because I can't afford to lose a week this time of year so I had to do an XP recovery. Besides insufficient printer support another one of the drawbacks of Ubuntu is time consuming hardware compatibility issues like this one. I would still like to run a dual boot system with Linux but that's going to have to wait until after the racing season. Even the off season only offers a narrow window of time between the pre holiday photo rush, the GRP contest and ramping up for the coming season. I'm putting Linux on the back burner but I intend to try it again in the future. Anyways, the system restore went well and the only thing left to do is enter an occasional password and download a few browser plugins. I'm doing a long format of the new drive partitions then I'll set one up for file sharing so I can put our growing collection of family photos on it. The other partition, about 500 gigs, will be for my racing photos. That's the reason I got the large drive, so I could copy a decade of scans and CD's to one easy access location. I'm sick of digging through shoe boxes of CD's every time I need to go into my archives.

I got rid of my Qwest DSL and phone service and went to cable internet and saved about $50 per month. I purchased a Skype account and got a USB headset with a microphone so I can make calls anywhere in the US free of charge. We got a USB adapter to connect our cordless phone to Skype so it can double as a home phone system. The USB adapter directions and Skype directions were cryptic and I couldn't figure out the call sequence to make outgoing calls with the cordless. I could call my cordless on the Skype number with a cell phone and received the incoming call but I couldn't call out. Seeing as it worked fine using the headset and I could receive calls with the cordless I knew there had to be a setting or dialing sequence that I wasn't seeing. I posted the question on the Skype forum and one of the moderators replied with the answer. You have to use the country code, (area code-phone number) and an * after the number. That solved the problem but I'm thinking to myself "here I am building and maintaining computers and I can't figure out a USB phone adapter"...what's wrong with that picture? I can do almost anything with technology as long as there are good directions and I'm wearing my reading glasses. LMFAO Seriously, that is one of my pet peeves, electronic devices with incomplete directions and poor help sections on their websites.

So that's what I have been up to lately. My goal now is to apply my speaking, recording and tech knowledge to racing.

Today is going to be a nice day so as soon as I get the last load of laundry in the washer I'm going to run to the store and buy a gas grille. So far this morning I got up, fed the cats, made the coffee, have one load in the washer and one in the dryer, took out the trash and straightened up the kitchen. The wife finally got to take the sling off her arm after six weeks and started physical therapy. Talk about a kick in the *ss, the copay is $35 per visit and she's got to a couple times a week. On top of that she's got another unrelated procedure that has to be done next Tuesday so I might have to take a day of vacation unless she feels comfortable driving herself there. She did get in the car and went shopping yesterday after six weeks of not driving. I hope that she finds a ride or feels comfortable driving there herself because I have already used too many vacation days and racing hasn't even started yet.

If you have a family some years are going to be like this where other things have to come before racing. Some years it has been my medical problems, a few years we had a daughter and granddaughter living with us and this year we're dealing with my wife's health problems. I suppose I could have been like some of the racing fans and stayed single but I love the family connection and racing is just one aspect of my life. I think you can kind of see that, especially early in the season when all these rabid fans are running all over h*ll looking to attend their first race. I stay home and try to get some early outside work done, clean the garage, get organized for the season and wait for the racing to start at my local track. As far as I'm concerned I can drive a half hour to see weekly classes at two tracks so I'm not going to travel long distances and incur motel expenses or do a redeye for a weekly show. I'm a specials events snob when it comes to traveling, it's got to be something pretty big for me to travel that far. I only have a limited amount of money to spend on racing and with my wife not working and going through physical therapy I have to plan my schedule out carefully. Hopefully I'll sell a few pics early in the season but I'm not counting on it because that's so competitive early in the season that I never sell much this time of the year. There are several photographers that make a living selling pics and they go after the hero card business very aggressively early in the season. Consequently, guys like me who take photos mostly for the publications and don't canvass the pit area selling photos like they do kind of get shoved aside until a little later in the year. I have so many things going that I don't have time to do a lot of the custom artwork anyways and don't have a competitive low cost bulk printing source so I just step aside and let them knock themselves out. My bread and butter as far as photos is selling enough of the 5x7's and 8x10's to supplement travel expenses. This year is going to get off to a tough start so I hope the wife heals up quickly and I don't have to start cutting the planned travel out of my schedule.

The vacation roster has been tough this year too. Usually when one gets older and gets more seniority scheduling improves in their favor but in my case our staff is being reduced by retirements making single day vacation scheduling more difficult. Thursday and Friday vacation for some of the events I have taken for granted like the Masters and USA Nationals may be difficult to get this year. I decided to quit camping out at multi day shows because there aren't any electrical hookups so I can't charge batteries and send to the publications from my camper. The partying and lack of sleep was getting old anyways, the way I look at it now is that I can only do one or the other, not both. Often I'm up until 3am after the races photo editing and getting organized for the next day. Try doing that with a hangover in a 100 degree tent trailer with no electrical hookup or internet access sometime. I've got a couple of single day events that I'll camp out at but that's going to be the extent of it. The Firecracker/WoO weekend and Jerry Richert Memorial will be my two camping excursions this season. I don't know if I'll be able to afford the motel for the Deer Creek WoO and Jackson Nationals weekend but I can guarantee that I won't be doing those with a camper. If I can get the days off and I can't afford to stay in a motel with high speed internet I'll probably just do the WoO after work on Wednesday night then head for home. There's always plenty of work around the house and nearby weekly shows to attend. I love the Jackson shows but the way it's getting anymore for me 210 miles feels more like 2010 financially and vacation wise.

Later.

Thursday, and I have a few things to cover...

2009-04-02T17:04:00.000-07:00

The latest issue of the Midwest Racing Connection is now posted on theracingconnection.com Check out my "Inside Dirt column and interview with Ron Bernhagen of the Upper Midwest Sprintcar Series.

I switched from DSL to a cable internet connection so if you have my old email address, gotomn@mninter.net, in your address book you'll want to delete it and use mndirt@hotmail.com instead. I'm still using stanm@gotomn.com but am in the process of migrating all of my email messages into the hotmail account because it's easier to manage and I can access that one from work during the day.

Southern Minnesota is supposed to get hit by a snowstorm this weekend so I think it's a safe bet that the Deer Creek opener will not take place as scheduled. Red Cedar has already canceled their scheduled opener that was supposed to take place on April 10. I'm already looking ahead to the weekend of the 17th and 18th as the probable opener.

We'll, I've got a bunch more to say but am too busy to type right now. I'll pick it up tomorrow.

Oh, one more thing. When I signed up for Facebook I had no idea that it would keep me so busy....

Windows reinstalled, backup files restored and some fresh idea...

2009-03-29T17:01:00.000-07:00

First a video of our granddaughter one year ago.

And now a word from our sponsor.

Are you feeling run down, out of sorts, not in sync with the rest of the world? Then I have just the thing that you're looking for. A post on Stan's MDTR blog, the place where nonsense rules and conversation centers around absolutely nothing.

My windows reinstall went better than expected. XP and sp3 installed seamlessly and with the help of my trusty backup drive I was up and running by 2pm on Saturday in time to do some visiting. There are a few minor tweaks and passwords left to plug in but we're almost up-to-speed. As has been the case since 1996 I would have liked to have done some upgrades to the computer but I decided that I'll stick with what I've got for a while. We're moving along plenty fast so this will have to do for a while.

I'm good to go now.

Windows reinstall this weekend

2009-03-26T18:32:00.000-07:00

I have been busy lately so I haven't posted much on the blog. A few days ago I started a post and saved it as a draft but changed my mind and deleted it.

I got the cars both done, the plugs and wires in the Olds and a new radiator in my truck. I've been pretty busy doing the cooking, cleaning, laundry, shopping, cleaning the sh*t out of the litter boxes and all that other stuff the wife usually does. She's sitting back with her arm still in a sling watching American Idol, The Biggest Loser, Dancing with the Stars, Hell's Kitchen, Desperate Housewives, ER, The Amazing Race, and a bunch of other stuff. As a matter of fact, she maxes out the dual channel DVR so I can't switch the second tuner into the other room and watch television. My wife loves her shows. I get the TV for a few minutes on the weekends if there's sports on but that's about it.

I spent the entire night downloading and saving the latest versions of programs that I'm using to my firewire storage drive. I'm backing everything up tonight so that I can come home from work tomorrow and start reinstalling Windows from the recovery discs. My computer is overdue for a system restore and I really should have done it sooner but all this other stuff came up with the car repairs and surgery. I'm glad that I've got a couple weekends left before the season starts because it takes a good two weeks before everything is configured properly. I'll get the OS up and running probably by late Friday night but what takes time is installing all the individual programs, looking up and entering passwords, configuring everything and all that tedious stuff. A lot of programs require reboots so you end up sitting there restarting over and over each time a program is installed.

My restore partition got corrupted so I'm going to have to reinstall from my recovery discs. My computer allowed me to burn one copy of the recovery discs but I have never used them so we'll see how that goes. If somehow they got corrupted then I would be forced to purchase a copy of Windows so I hope they work. I'd go with Linux as an alternative but I've got some essential Windows software that I have to run so I'd be stuck spending the money if that were the case. I buy all my computer parts at General Nano, they have a pretty good price on XP with SP3 so that's where I'd go. It's an OEM copy so you have to buy a piece of hardware with XP, hard drive screws are 5 cents. LOL But I'm hoping for the best with my install discs because I don't want to put anymore money in this box.

On my next PC I'm going back to a home build and will run a dual boot system with Windows and Linux on an Intel processor with the maximum amount of ram I can use. I want a good TV tuner card that doubles as a DVR, a large 2nd drive and a good CD/DVD RW. A P4 would do me just fine as I'm not so much interested in speed as I am reliability and a work horse machine that keeps plugging away.

I'll type to you when I'm done with the reinstall.

Fixing cars, musings about vinyl wall graphics, Sprints excluded from interviews and various other thoughts...

2009-03-16T16:58:00.000-07:00

Howdy, it's Monday night. I'm going through the nightly process of charging and reloading my MP3 player. I've got a huge selection of podcasts that I record on a weekly basis covering just about every subject from A-Z. But more on that later.

I finally got the Olds finished on Saturday afternoon. Number 3 cylinder was missing and it turned out to be a loose injector wire. The intake gaskets had been replaced recently and even though the plug appeared to be securely fastened it wasn't. I pushed down on it and it made a "click" sound when it locked into place. As a result of the misfire I replaced all the plugs and wires so it's probably a good thing that this happened otherwise I might not have taken the time to do a tuneup. The plugs and wires were pretty rough looking so it worked out for the best. My next task before the start of the racing season, replace the radiator on the pickup. It's a four cylinder standard transmission, no cruise or air so there's only a few bolts, a couple hoses and a few fastener screws holding a plastic shroud over the top of the fan. Shouldn't be too bad of a job...key word "shouldn't." LOL anybody that works on their tired iron knows why I'm laughing about that one...

I heard a commercial for the company that sells vinyl images of race cars where you send them a photo of your favorite car and they make a wall vinyl out of it. After hearing about it I decided to check out their website to see what they're doing to protect the photographer's copyright. They mentioned copyright but how do I as a photographer know that they're not going to gain access to one of my images without my knowledge? Fans and race teams can send them photos that they'll create a wall sticky out of and they can put their images up for sale and make commission on them. How do I know that I didn't sell somebody a photo and they in turn are making money from my work through this wall sticker company? I don't. There's no way that I'll ever know. For that reason I don't like it because I don't want somebody telling them it's their photo but actually they're making money off my work. There's not much I can do about it, it's a lot bigger than me and my limited influence, but I'm sure the other photographers would agree with me. It appears to me that it would be easy to pull the wool over their eyes and use photos that you don't have authorization to use. Aside from my concerns about my work they look pretty cool.

Speaking of using photographer's photos it bugs me when people post things like this on message boards: "I'm (fill in the project), send me photos". Now I don't mind contributing photos for advertising, t-shirt design, etc., but the thing that rubs me the wrong way is when people demand that we send them photos. Stop and consider, previous season's photos are stored on CD by event. If someone requests for example all the Cedar Lake Late Model or Mod photos of a particular driver I'm supposed to volunteer hours of my time to go through my files and send some stranger that I don't even know free photos? Get a clue!!! It's time consuming, I have an investment in time, work and equipment and I don't give photos away to strangers. That doesn't mean that I never contribute a photo to a specific person for a specific purpose but I won't send pics to people I don't even know because they made some reference to their "project" on some message board. People that make those kinds of demands are clueless because if they knew how much work it is they'd offer to pay for the pics as a courtesy.

I was pretty excited when they started doing those driver interview podcasts and I have downloaded and listened to just about every one of them. There are two associated websites doing the interviews, one nationally which I really like because they do high profile Sprint and Late Model driver interviews and another one concentrating on our local area. Unfortunately, the local one has gone in a direction that I'm not crazy about and I should have known was coming. Only two Sprint Car drivers have been interviewed so far and both divide their time between Modifieds and Sprints so they're not exclusively Sprint Car drivers. In fact, the interviewer put the emphasis on the Modified and only mentioned the Sprint Car in passing. These guys are so clueless about Sprint Car racing that they don't even know what kind of questions to ask a Sprint driver.

Also, the podcasts have an obvious "big W" agenda and that is no surprise considering that the one doing the interviews is a "big W" writer. Don't take what I'm saying the wrong way, the podcast interviews are well done but they're ignoring Sprint Car racing and putting the emphasis on the "big W." There's a lot of other racing around here, Sprints of various sanctions, NASCAR tracks, USRA Mods, IMCA at some of the Minnesota tracks, two World of Outlaws Sprint Car drivers live in Minnesota as well as a former IRA Champion. Matter of fact, one of the interviewers asked me for contact information for Sprint Car drivers and I send them email addresses and phone numbers over a month ago but still no Sprint interviews. That's bullsh*t when they go ga, ga over some 16 y/o Street Stock driver but ignore Craig Dollansky, Brooke Tatnell, Travis Whitney, Jerry Richert Jr., and a host of other talented drivers. It's a shame that they're ignoring Sprint Car racing.

Wake up people!!! It's not a sin to not pledge one's allegiance to the "big W" and it's OK to like Sprint Cars. There, I said it...whew, I feel better already.

Well, that's probably enough venting for the time being.

Questions? Comments? Cat Calls? I respond to criticism at mndirt@hotmail.com

Enjoyed the UMSS meeting, working on the Olds, studying my successes...

2009-03-08T16:53:00.000-07:00

I attended the Upper Midwest Sprintcar Series (UMSS) meeting at the Settlement just north of Somerset yesterday, March 8, 2009. The meeting went well, it was good to see everyone after the long winter. I'll be writing more about the UMSS as the beginning of the season draws near.

Does anybody who works on cars know if I have to disconnect the motor mounts and roll the motor forward in order to replace plugs on a '98 Olds Intrigue 3800 V6? The scanner says that I've got a misfire in cylinder #3 (#3 is middle front but I might as well replace them all). I swapped the coils and the misfire is still in #3. I'm also getting a second code, open injector circuit but the injector sounds like it's working so I think that code was caused by the miss. Email me if you know if I can reach the rear bank of plugs.

Now that we're getting close to the racing season it's almost time to review my successes and failures. Pretty soon I'll be going through all my 2008 photo CD's using a program that provides camera specific information. Often times I'll get home and see that I caught a really awesome shot and I'll go through the settings in a graphics program called "Polyview" that quickly shows focal length, shutter speed, ISO and f-stop. If there are some pics that really suck I'll make note of the settings on those and see what the difference was between the good and bad ones. I'll even do this for familiar tracks because I'm never satisfied, I always want to find a way to do better every time I go out.

Most of the time I have to pretty much put the race out of my mind and concentrate on shooting photos because I can't do a good job if I'm watching the race closely. If it's a really awesome race maybe I'll skip taking a shot for a few laps so I can watch some of the action but for the most part I have to concentrate.

I'll type more later this week...

I like Sprint Car racing...

2009-03-05T16:34:00.000-08:00

I like Sprint Car racing! I like Sprint Car racing! I like Sprint Car racing!

Those are probably some of the most unpopular words that any writer/photographer/webmaster that lives here in the upper Midwest could ever say. I am convinced that if I would have renounced my love of Sprint Car racing and jumped on the bandwagon with everyone else around here back in '99 when I started the gotomn.com website that it would have been 10x more popular. Not that it's too shabby as it is because the stats are pretty good for what it is, a static photo and links page. Here's some recent statistical data:

Unique visitors (number of unique visitors during the month):

January 14,273
February 12,146

Page views (total number of pages visited during the month = hits):

January 23,248
February 18,959

It's not unusual for the hits to drop off a bit after the GRP trivia contest is wrapped up but as the season draws closer they will pick up substantially. As you can see, we're still sustaining a decent number of regular visitors each month and that's what I look for. A lot of websites would salivate over that many visitors including many of the series and track websites.

As long as my site is relevant and people are still looking at it that's good. It's still fun for me, the work and expense are justified by your visits and the costs to keep it online are minimal at around $100 per year. In addition to gotomn.com I have two additional domains available with this account and over 100 gigs of website space. Even at the rate I'm slamming photos on the site each season if I were to leave them on there I'd be about 95 years old before I have to even think about running out of web space. The bandwidth is never going to be an issue because it's a static photo and links page, by that I mean there isn't any multimedia. Actually, this blog isn't a part of my hosting account (although I could bring it in house) so anything I put on here doesn't count towards my space. In other words, as long as I'm able it will be business as usual. Mostly I'm providing the site to display some of the history of racing in this area, some convenient links and of course my photos which I hope a few people will purchase because that helps a little with my expenses. I'm not asking for a stimulus package, the photos add some value to the walls of your home or shop when framed. LOL

Anyways, I love Sprint Car racing. I enjoy the other forms of dirt track racing and have made many great friends in all forms of the sport but Sprints were my first love and one always remembers their first with a special fondness. This season is going to be a great year for Sprint Car racing with the UMSS series. There are cars being built, drivers coming out of retirement, and a great deal of excitement is in the air regarding this series. In view of all the negative things we see in the news this is probably one of the biggest day brighteners of the year for me and many others. The thing that I really have to commend the 360 Sprint Car people for is that they finally took a look around them and realized what the "lay of the racing land" is around here. They made one of the wisest decisions I think anyone in the top divisions has made in a long time, they decided to limit the engines and to come in with a purse comparable to the Modifieds. That might not sound like much and some people were resistant at first but when one considers the excitement that Sprint Cars provide and that now tracks can book a UMSS show at a lower cost than a Late Model or Modified special I believe that their purse structure is going to put them at a competitive advantage. Yes, there is still a niche for the big boys like the Outlaws and IRA when they come around but week in and week out we needed something like this. It promotes interest among the fans and gives drivers a reason to want to get involved with a Sprint Car.

I look at these deals like the Rumble Series where local Late Models that we see every week were coming into the same tracks they run weekly and demanding a $10,000 to win purse and I could see that was not good economics for the promoters. I heard from several reliable sources that they lost money when they brought those races into tracks around western Wisconsin and tried to raise the ticket prices. Stop and think about it, fans see most of those drivers at places like Red Cedar, Cedar Lake, Deer Creek, and Rice Lake every Saturday night for $10 to $12. They're going to think twice about a $20 ticket and in some cases a weekday race to see the same guys they can see every weekend. Sure, it's probably a big deal when those drivers race somewhere like western Minnesota, the Dakotas or Montana but this is their home territory and we have been watching them race since they started in Street Stocks. The logistics of trying to build on that kind of a foundation just weren't making any sense and it became manifest at the gate. It takes someone like a Scott Bloomquist or Billy Moyer to get people around here excited enough to put down the extra money. And those kinds of high admission shows aren't something people can afford to do as often anymore. Wise promoters have been listening at the promoters workshops and are finding ways to build on their weekly shows and local audience. The UMSS will help them to do that.

The purse for the UMSS is very competitive and promoters have been advised not to raise the ticket price for the fans no more than a buck or two over a weekly show if they feel that they have to raise it. The organizers of the UMSS would prefer that tracks do not raise the ticket price so the weekly fans will still come to the races. After talking to one of the organizers during the past couple of days I think people are going to be surprised at how many cars they will draw. If this series does well in the first year and generates fan interest my prediction is that it's going to be hard to hold them back. Young fans who are into extreme sports and will see that Sprint Car racing offers a unique brand of excitement and action. With time people's preferences tend to swing back and forth like a pendulum and we have been on the Stock Car side of that swinging pendulum for about 25 years. I think that the time is right for Sprint Car racing to stage a strong comeback around the east Metro and western Wisconsin.

The UMSS will contest ten of their nights of racing at the new Kopellah Speedway. The reason I'm saying "new" Kopellah is that owner Marguerite Lindblom has enlisted the services of Chris Stepan of FYE Promotions to run the business and promotions end of the Kopellah Speedway. Sprint Car people might not be familiar with Chris but I can guarantee that they will come to appreciate him in short order. Chris is admittedly a fan of the Late Models and Modifieds but this is an excellent opportunity for the local Sprint people to get to know Chris and work with him to make the Kopellah UMSS races a success. I guarantee that if they give Chris their full cooperation and put on a good show for the fans that it can only lead to good things for the UMSS. As Chris said in his Kopellah press release he plans on "making Kopellah the place to be on a Friday night" and you better believe that's what's going to happen. If the UMSS puts on a good show and has good car counts it could result in opportunities to participate in other FYE events. I'm probably getting a little bit ahead of myself but I know a good promoter when I see one and Mr. Stepan is a rising star in that field.

As you can see I'm very excited about the UMSS and the new things that are taking place on the local racing scene. I'll be writing more about this in the coming weeks and months.

Too busy to post for a while

2009-03-03T16:32:00.000-08:00

It's March 3rd already and I have been very busy lately so that's my excuse for not posting. My wife had rotator cuff surgery on February 24th so I had to take a couple days of vacation to help her and have been doing all the hosehold chores. She will have to wear a sling for five more weeks and it will take up to a year for the shoulder to return to normal. In the meantime she can't work or do much of anything besides her therapy in a special motorized chair designed to raise and lower her arm. Today she took an improvised shower/spounge bath and when she was done she couldn't get her arm back in her sling so she had to call someone to come over and help. She has another unrelated procedure coming up that we're anxious about so this has been a difficult winter for Deb and I.

A few weeks ago I had an intake gasket and water pump put on my wife's go. Prior to having the work done the check engine light had come on but the car was running alright. When I had it in for the repair I had my friend who did the work put it on his scanner and found out it needed a $60 MAP sensor. I fixed that and it was running great then the Sunday prior to my wife's surgery the oil pressure light came on. I took it in and had a new sensor put on for that and again it was running great. This past Sunday I was half way to the grocery store (maybe the problem is that I shouldn't be going grocery shopping) and all of a sudden it started running rough. The check engine light flashed then it stayed on so I parked it in the garage and haven't touched it since. I called my brother-in-law and he said that it sounds like a coil pack. A friend of mine is going to let me use his hand held scanner so I can get the codes and he will let me know what the problem is. He said it sounded like a coil pack so that's two people telling me the same thing. I'm going to borrow his scanner for this repaid and will have to get my own basic OBDII scanner so I can do my own diagnosis the next time this kind of thing happens. I've got a lot of "coaches" that I can call for free advice and the basic scanners are under $100 so it would be a good investment.

My truck needs a little bit of work as well but it's nothing that has to be done right away. They were known for the bushings between the tank and fin tubes leaking in cold weather but it only leaks in below zero weather and once the weather warms it doesn't leak a drop all summer. Nevertheless, I think it would be a good idea to replace it.

Speaking of placing old worn out parts I had my annual physical today after work. I had the lab work done a couple weeks in advance, my cholesterol was a little higher and I need to drop a few pounds and watch what I eat but everything else looks good. I have to go back and get it checked in six months and have been walking and trying to eat better. My neck hardware and arthritis in my back and shoulders limit me from jogging like I used to do but I'm cleared for walking long distances. I live next to a walking patch so I don't have any excuses except for the ice, snow and snowmobiles going by at 50mph. when it warms up and the path is safe to walk I'll get back out there. In the meantime I'm walking 40-60 minutes per day in the skyway and will walk down by the river during my lunch break when it warms up in a month or so. This season I'm going to make an effort to avoid the fried foods at the races and try to find something on the menu that's better for me. Good luck on that one. Cholesterol medication can affect your liver and that would mean no beer so there's some real incentive to control my cholesterol. LOL

But enough about the cares of life, let's talk some racing. Check out my "Inside Dirt" column in the latest issue of The Midwest Racing Connection as well as all the fine articles and photos. I downloaded the latest issue, saved the pdf file to my flash drive and brought it to work so I could read it during breaks.

The UMSS meeting will take place this Saturday at the Settlement in Somerset. Details about the spec engine that we built by Wheeler Racing Engines of Blaine will be revealed aw well as more information about the rules package. I plan on attending so I can keep up with what's going on as the series takes shape.

You have probably heard by now that the Sandbox races have been canceled due to not enough pre-entries. It was going to be a Karting and Legends extravaganza this year, no Midgets, so it would have been an unfamiliar form of racing for me. Those divisions put on some good races last year and it would have been nice to get out and shake out the camera equipment but now I'll have to wait another week. I'm looking forward to the outdoor season and hoping for decent weather early in the season.

You're probably wondering why I write about everything under the sun here on the blog. The reason is that even though my website is dedicated to racing this blog has morphed into an informal chat with friends. Think of it as us sitting around the campfire after the races having a few beers and talking with friends about whatever comes to mind. Just because I'm a racing writer and photographer doesn't mean that I don't have other things going on in my life. I've got plenty of other concerns, worries, challenges, likes, dislikes and opinions. Jotting them down on the blog is good therapy for me and if somebody doesn't think this type of thing has anyplace on a racing website, well they don't have to read it if they don't want to.

We've got kids, in laws, outlaws, grandkids, pets, jobs, cars, trucks, homes, apartments, hobbies, cares, worries, health issues and all kinds of other things going on in our lives besides cars going in circles on dirt. Any racing writer, photographer, driver, promoter, or anyone else involved in the sport that leads you to believe otherwise is either in denial or full of sheeeet.

Type to you later!!!

Manual focus lens practice

2009-02-21T08:13:00.001-08:00

I'm anxious to get out and try this 135mm f2.8 manual lens at the races. This thing is supposed to be an f2.8 but I noticed that I have to use a slower f-stop than I do with my other fast lenses under the same conditions. Apparently this lens is rated at f2.8 but in testing it appears to be faster than it's rated. That's a good thing for night racing shots. Depth of field looks good, all but the last photo were taken at iso200, f16, 1/320th auto white balance. The clouds thickened up a little when I was setting up for the last shot so I had to set the f-stop at f8.

This lens is entirely manual, the Nikon digital camera metering does not function when used with this lens. All settings must be set on the camera and if I'm shooting flash that has to be set manually as well. The manual focus is smooth and precise as you can see in these test shots. I took six test shots, these five turned out and the sixth was a little out of focus. That's a good average for a manual focus lens. Of course the action will be quite a bit faster at the track than it was for these still shots but based on my limited test results manual focus is not going to be a liability on this lens. This is a niche lens, it won't be used all night but it will be useful in some lighting and distance situations.

My lens lineup for 2009 is going to look something like this:

500mm fixed f8 manual lens used for long outside the track shots over the top of the fence with available light.

70-300mm f4.5-5.6 auto focus used for outside the track shots and infield long shots in available light as well as fill flash shots till dusk. This lens has produced more magazine and newspaper shots than any other lens I have. It's a budget lens but within certain focal lengths it produces images comparable to professional lenses. If I am careful to stay within those parameters this can be a very productive lens. I especially like how quickly it locks into focus for head on shots. Like they say in racing, "it ain't the chrome that makes it go."

135mm f2.8 manual lens (this was today's test lens) can be used from dusk through B Mains for single car shots with flash. Not a good victory lane lens but it's going to be awesome for closely cropped single car shots.

85mm f1.8 auto focus my workhorse lens used at night for flash action shots, 4 wide salute and victory lane at some tracks. Nikon makes an 85mm f1.4 but that lens is over $1,000, this one was gray market (no US warranty) and cost me less than $400 delivered. F1.8 is plenty fast, open it up and slow the shutter down and this baby does a great job of catching those 4 wide salute to the crowd shots.

28-105mm f2.8 auto focus used for Feature races and victory lane as an alternative to the 85mm at some tracks depending on how roomy victory lane is. This was my most expensive lens at over $800 and probably the biggest disappointment. In retrospect I'd have bought a Nikon 80-200mm f2.8 for approximately the same price. Last fall I discovered that when I put this lens on I need to turn the iso one speed faster and it does a much better job. I had the 85mm on then switched to this one for victory lane and thought I'd try some adjustments to see if I could get better performance. I was pleased with the results and now I know that I can use it during the Feature if victory lane has tight quarters.

As you can see, I'm not crazy about zoom lenses anymore. There are some situations where I have to use them but I shoot the majority of my photos now with prime lenses. If this manual focus lens produces the desired results (it appears that it will) I am going to add more of them to my collection. Some of the Cedar Lake banquet slide presentation outside the track shots were taken with the 500mm manual lens from up on the hill. All of my film camera shots up through 2003 were taken with manual focus lenses and all manual camera settings. Last season I finally gave in and started using shutter priority early in the evening when the sun starts going down. The reason for that is because the lighting conditions change so rapidly that it's difficult to keep up with adjustments. Aside from that half hour or so when the light is changing all of my settings are done manually. I prefer that because I feel like I can control things much better.

Here are the samples:

2009 plans and a surprising statistic...

2009-02-20T16:31:00.001-08:00

I'm going to take a few minutes to talk about my 2009 racing plans. Of course nobody can make any plans to go racing without transportation to get them to the track. I'll be driving the ol' Ranger for the seventh consecutive racing season so as to put off car payments for another year. I only drive about a mile per day to a park & ride and take a vanpool back and forth to work so that makes it possible for me to hang onto my vehicles longer than most people would. I have been in car pools, rode the MTC bus or rode in vanpools for going on thirty years now, not for environmental reasons but mostly for cost savings and convenience. It's nice to be able to buy a vehicle in 2003, still be driving it in 2009 and only have put about 34,000 miles on it in six years. My truck will probably rust out before the mileage hits 150,000, it's 16 years old and currently at about 139,200 miles. The last brake rebuild was a year ago, the exhaust and battery about two years, the starter a year, and it was tuned up a year ago. The tires are a few years old but they still look like new. The rubber on the sidewalls will probably start cracking before the tread starts to show any wear.

The old girl needs is a new radiator so I'll try to do that before the racing season begins. I could probably get by without replacing the radiator, the Rangers had problems with grommets leaking between the tank and fin tubes in cold weather. It leaked a little bit when the weather was below zero there for a couple weeks but has since stopped. Apparently radiator replacement due to this problem was covered under one of the recalls for this particular model but I'm long past taking advantage of that. It's a 5 speed with no air and a manual transmission so the radiator has four bolts holding it in, two hose clamps and a quarter round plastic shroud held on by a couple of screw/clip fasteners. Even I should be able to handle that job when the weather gets a little warmer. Perhaps the Saturday that the canceled Sandbox race was scheduled for would be a good day to do the repair. It has been leaking like this only in sub zero weather for a couple of years and as soon as the weather warms up it doesn't leak a drop all summer. I could probably let it go and keep dumping anti freeze in but I hate having to go out and do that when it's 20 below. At the rate I put miles on my vehicles this truck could last a couple more years so it's probably a good idea to get it done.

I'm not advocating that everyone drive tired iron but so far that has worked for me.

So now that I've got a way to get there let's take a look at my schedule. I'm planning on getting out to both nights of the Cedar Lake opener. It's going to be exciting to see the Late Models, Modifieds, Midwest Modifieds and Super Stocks take to the track for the first time in 2009. I've got all ten UMSS races at Kopellah on my schedule. The Billy Anderson Memorial at Cedar Lake, CLS School bus night, the Masters, all the CLS Sprint races. The Masters, the Firecracker, the Outlaws, the USA Nationals, Richert Memorial and Legendary 100. Forgive me if I missed anything.

The Elko Dirt Nationals, Deer Creek, Jackson and Brainerd vacation list and budget willing. Two IRA stops at Rice Lake. Possibly some Princeton and a visit to the new track in Ogilvie. It's going to be a stretch this year but I'll even try to take in the Fireman's Nationals at Angell Park and Roger Rager's induction into the NSCHOF at Knoxville.

Traveling beyond the nearby tracks might be more of a challenge this year but I'm pretty confident I'll be able to stick to most of my proposed schedule. I've got enough money in the budget to do about 40 races close to home, CLS, Kopellah, Elko, Ogilvie and possibly Princeton. Rice Lake won't be a problem, Deer Creek, brainerd, Superior and Jackson are a little further and require a motel stay so those will depend on car pool opportunities and photo sales. I tuned up our Olds and the only things left to do are a stabilizer bar and alignment which I'll tend to before the season starts. I'm looking forward to getting past the planning stage and getting outside doing something. These winters start to get kind of oppressive by the time March rolls around.

I was going through my files the other day and happened upon a strange statistic. I have sold 410 and 360 Sprint Car photos, Modified photos, Midwest Modified photos, Super Stock photos, Street Stock photos, Pure Stock Photos, Hornet photos, and even Kart photos. But I have never sold a Late Model photo. That's kind of a strange irony considering that up to 75% of the races I attend each season were Late Model shows.

The UMSS races combined with nearby IRA and World of Outlaws shows along with Jackson and Arlington will make it possible to reverse my trend of spending more time at fendered than open wheel race. I've still got my Late Model friends that I'll be seeing whenever I've got a free Saturday night but I'll be putting a little more emphasis on the Sprints this year. I've still got my favorite Late Model shows etched in stone on the schedule and I'll be watching the NASCAR Late Models every free Saturday night I get. I'm blessed because I enjoy a wide variety of racing have the opportunity to fill that need for variety without having to travel very far. What's nice about the Sprint shows up here is that when I follow them to the various tracks I get to see a lot of drivers in the support classes that I wouldn't get to watch if I always stuck to one routine. I like the variety, all of these racers regardless of what class of cars they drive all love the sport.

Well, that's going to do it for tonight's thoughts. I'm ready to kick back and watch some television for a while before I hit the sack.

Later

Middle of the week already!!!

2009-02-18T16:13:00.000-08:00

Where did the past week go? Time sure flies when you're having fun. There was even a three day weekend (President's Day) and it's gone by already.

Some people might not agree but I think that after over a decade it's safe to think of myself as a writer and photographer. My work has appeared in quite a few publications and I write a regular column so I think it's appropriate to think of myself as a member of the racing media. If you type the search words "dirt track racing" in Google my website comes up at the top. I would expect a good ranking when I include "Minnesota" in the search but to see it come up at the top of the listings when I type in "dirt track racing" is awesome. With all the commercial dirt track sites out there I never expected mine to hit the top of the list. Barry Braun of the Dirtcast.com told me that longevity is a factor and gotomn has been online since 1999 so he makes a good point. I listen to a podcast called "Weekly Web Tools" which focuses on the self taught do-it-yourself web designers like me. They said it's important to have the proper keywords in your META TAGS as well as good text links on your pages. I have always made it a point to try to make navigation simple for visitors so evidently it has paid off in other ways.

I've got some pet peeves about some of the racing websites so I might was well list a few while I'm on the subject. I'm not trying to say mine isn't without fault but there are some things out there that I find especially irritating. One is all the pay sites for dirt track racing that have come online the past few years. If their goal is to make money from the sport (something I find distasteful) they should get enough sponsors so that they can offer free content. I don't know about you but it's important to me to pay my credit card down in this economy. $4.95 per month for this website, $29.95 per season for that website, pretty soon a person could rack up $100 or more just on dirt track sites alone. Add that to my monthly satellite bill and it's just too much to justify for entertainment. The way I look at it is if I can visit streaming online movies and TV shows for free why should I pay $29.95 per season to subscribe to a dirt track site? So I think you hear where I'm coming from, I can watch the NFL, MLB, and NASCAR on network TV for free so where does a little ol' niche sport like dirt track racing come off charging me for content? Some would say to me "there's a simple solution, if you don't like it you don't have to watch." I agree 100%, I don't like it and I don't watch.

With the exception of message boards which I understand have to require registration for security purposes I shouldn't have to sign up with a website to view content. For example, there are driver websites out there that require visitors to setup a user name and password to view the driver's schedule and photo gallery. Let's see now, I've been online since 1996, during that time I have collected a full notebook of user names and passwords to numerous sites. Nope, with all due respect to those drivers I don't have that urgent of a need to know where you're going to race. Certain things on websites like schedules, viewing links pages, and looking through photo galleries should not require registration. When I come across a racing page like that I click out and move onto something else as fast as I can. Don't waste my time making me sign up because all you're doing is farming my personal information. Same goes for tracks and sanctioning bodies, trust me, you tracks and sanctions want to make your information easily accessible. Requiring registration is NOT easily accessible.

Cedar Lake canceled their Sandbox Arena race so I had to remove it from my schedule. Evidently they didn't get enough entrants to justify the expense of building the temporary track. I heard that there's still some issues with the ventilation for the bigger events like the Midgets so that's on hold for the time being. Hopefully they'll be able to resolve the issues but I'm not real optimistic when it comes to spending money on the building right now. For my own selfish reasons I really wasn't looking forward to the Karts and Legends so I'm not too upset by the news. I'd have enjoyed it once I got out there but it's not likely I'd have sold many photos and I'm not into those types of racing so it would have been a lot of time and effort doing something I'm not crazy about. The average fan doesn't see this but when one writes and shoots for publications you're bound to work some events that aren't as high on your list as others. No offense to the participants but it would have been a long weekend. I'm looking forward to the outdoor opener, that's what turns me on, the first two nights of Late Models, Mods, Supers and Midwest Mods on the big track.

Well, that's going to do it for tonight. Next time I post well take a fun look ahead at some of the big special shows this season.

An alternative to Miller Lite

2009-02-14T19:31:00.001-08:00

Times are tough so I'll give you a tip. If you're looking for an alternative to Miller Lite try a twelve pack of Milwaukee's Best Light. It's made by the Miller Brewing Company and has a taste similar it's higher priced big name cousin but only nicks me for $6.25 per twelve pack tax included at Wine & Roses in Forest Lake. They don't sell it in cases but two twelve packs only comes to $12.50 so you can't go wrong for at price.

I ran my cell phone through the wash machine. It sux when you do that because even with my upgrade option it still ended up costing me $100 bucks after rebates by the time I got a car charger and a holder to carry the phone on my belt. My wife's phone was overdue for an upgrade too so it I had to get two new phones but it was worth it because we were both overdue. Aside from the phone I had to do some work on the car and truck. The Olds needed intake gaskets, a water pump map sensor and is in line for a stabilizer bar, alignment and new battery. The Ranger needs a new radiator before racing gets underway so I'll have to dust off my tools and do that one myself. Routine annual maintenance.

Practice with the new lens has been coming along quite nicely. It has to be controlled 100% manually but I like the results.

New/Old look to gototmn.com website

2009-02-06T18:58:00.000-08:00

I made some eye pleasing, ease of navigation type changes to the gotomn.com website. The page is all white and we went back to one of the older logos that I like better than the one I was using. No fancy innovations or anything like that, just the same old photo, history and links page that's been out there for over ten years. Kind of like an old pair of sweats, easy going and comfortable but nothing fancy.

There has been a lot going on with me lately so I haven't made many blog posts. The wife is going in for shoulder surgery later this month so I'm going to be busy. I've been having some car repairs done recently. Things like intake gaskets, water pumps and a MAP sensor on the Olds. An upcoming radiator replacement on the Ranger. It's tired old iron but it's paid for and they've been running pretty good so I'm going to invest a couple more years in the current fleet.

I'm looking forward to the upcoming racing season. I ended up buying another lens to add to my collection. It's a prime lens, a manual focus 135mm f2.8 third party lens that was marketed by a distributorship known as Kalimar that started in St. Louis in 1952 and was in business through the mid 90's. As close as I can trace it's origins the lens was probabaly manufactured by Sigma for marketing by Kalimar. I got this lens off eBay for less than $100 but in it's day it was a $400 lens (mid '90's dollars) when it was being marketed for film cameras.

This thing was a rare find. It's a solid build by what I would consider the best third party lens builder, Sigma, and was marketed by Kalimar to stores such as JC Penny, Sears and others of that genre. It's a manual focus lens but it's pristine and produces excellent images. It's not something I'd use all night long but there's a niche for it during certain lighting conditions.

I tested this lens out by pointing it out the front door and taking a couple of shots across the road. I was impressed by this lens' sharpness and clarity which in my opinion rivals that of much more expensive professional lenses. You just can't go wrong with prime lenses, they're a pain in the ass to carry around in the dust and the weather but they flat out rock when it comes to photo quality.

I am thinking about doing a video version of this blog so that I don't have to type the blog anymore. I've got a webcam that would be up to the task and it would be a quick edit so I might do that when I feel like talking more than I feel like typing. A carpal tunnel saver for sure!!!

I'll type (or talk) to you again real soon...

I'll start making some blog posts soon...

2009-02-04T16:54:00.000-08:00

I was taking a break from the blog but now that racing has begun down in Florida I'll get busy and make some posts.

During my break from blogging I have been busy filling photo orders, writing for a couple of the publications and making some changes to the gotomn.com website. They're mostly design changes to clean up the website so it's easier to navigate and more pleasing to the eye. Nothing fancy, just the same basic text and photos that I've been doing for over ten years.

I'll announce it when I'm done.

It's been a h*lluva couple of bittersweet weeks...

2009-01-15T19:33:00.000-08:00

It's been a h*lluva couple of bittersweet weeks since the first of the year. Navy Davy left us unexpectedly. Whether it was shooting the shit in the Cedar Lake infield or filling in for my missing shipmate at Kopellah, I realize now that I took him for granted and should have spent more time hanging out with him. There comes a time in one's life, this is now for me, that one realizes they have done some things right, made some mistakes and continue to learn something new each and every day. Sometimes the problem is actually putting those lessons in action after the emotions and the pain of loss get back in check. As a tribute to Navy Davy I have gone through this entire blog and saved all of the "Navy Davy's Shot of the Week" that he shared with me. I will be creating a section on the gotomn.com website and posting all of his photos as well as a few others. The Navy Davy tribute section will be be left on the gotomn.com website as long as I am able to host and maintain the site. Hopefully one of the younger photogs will feel the need to preserve some of the work that I'm doing on my site when I'm done.

I talked to my friend Bill Taylor a couple of weeks ago. Bill took ill at Bonneville last summer where he was doing his usual duty as a starter on one of the courses and had to return home early. He told me that he's feeling better after a few visits to the doctor but he's got to slow down his pace a little. Bill sent me some information about the ARDUN flat head to Hemi engine conversion. Taylor was the first man to put a machine powered by an Ardun in the 200mph club in 1969 driving one of the model T bodied roaders. It's a very interesting read and I learned some interesting things about Bill's past that he has talked about before but I never made the full connection until I saw it in print.

I am listening to the Chili Bowl as I type this blog post. It's pretty cool to hear a race broadcast in the dead of winter. Tomorrow night is the CLS banquet so that should be fun to see the awards presentation and chat about racing.

In case you haven't heard, the 10th Annual GRP Racing Trivia Contest has begun and will be running for a week so be sure to enter.

Well, we're working our way through the alphabet at the Chili Bowl and the broadcast is getting more interesting. Later!

Ho, ho, ho.....

2008-12-24T06:43:00.000-08:00

GOOD MORNING!!!

I'm one of those guys that thinks the holidays are mostly for the women and kids. I enjoy the time off work and getting to see people but the celebration isn't my cup of tea. We won't go into the background of the dates or any of that stuff but look it up sometime and you'll learn some interesting facts about where the customs came from. But in spite of my indifference Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all.

There's a lot of off season shuffling going on right now. As I mentioned in my last entry, Proctor is still tossing around the idea of switching to Friday night. Idiots!!! I seldom get up to either track but have seen some great Sprint Car races at Superior. On the other hand, I've been to Proctor twice, the first time the track rubbered up and locked down, the second time the Feature was fogged out. I didn't think that Proctor was a very nice facility, small grandstands, rocks in the parking area that could easily cause someone to sprain an ankle while walking back to their car in the dark (and fog), so so racing surface, not the worst I've seen but certainly on the bottom half of my list. If it would have been a little nicer I'd have probably gone there more often. I'm not a big Sunday night racer but it's close enough, all freeway and they run the Late Model Feature early enough. I could make it home at a decent hour and get up for work the next morning. That wouldn't be possible for me with Jim Falls or Redwood Falls. But Proctor never gave me a good enough reason on their schedule to justify it. Whatever happens up there I hope everything works out for the best.

Probably the thing that's bothering me the most this season is the number of racers selling their equipment and leaving the sport. Due to the economy a lot of high profile racers are losing sponsors from Nascar all the way to the short tracks. I think that the best short tracks (best shows, best facilities, near population centers) are going to be maybe in a better position than some of the rural tracks.

My personal circumstances have changed a bit as well. The wife lost a portion of her part time income so that's going to cut into my racing budget. Every year I sell ten days of unused sick time and use the money to supplement my racing budget. This year instead of just supplementing the season that money will be the majority of my racing budget. I have expanded my racing media contributions and added another publication to my list and another media pass to my wallet. That makes three primary publications I'll be working for, Midwest Racing Connection (photos and column), Hawkeye Racing News (photos) and Flat Out Illustrated (photos and an occasional column). In addition to that I am an occasional photo contributor to Wissota's All The Dirt as well as Dirt Late Model. Last season I did a special project for the Cedar Lake Speedway NASCAR night program and contributed photos to several tracks during the course of the season. The media work helps out at the gate because without that I wouldn't be able to attend as often.

Finally, last and probably the least is the gotomn.com website. This will be my thirteenth season running a website. It started out in 1997 as a personal homepage and I switched to the gotomn.com URL in April of 1999 so it's the thirteenth for the website and the eleventh racing season as gotomn. The website hasn't grown or taken on new goals but I have tried a few things that I didn't have the time or the commitment to pursue. And the bottom line with my website is that it's a hobby, I'm not competing for sponsors, market share or page hits. It's just my view of the racing world, a place for a history section, some links, a place to display my photo gallery and at times sort of an artistic outlet.

So I'll be attending anywhere from 20 to 30 shows between Cedar Lake, Kopellah and a few other tracks depending on the money situation. If I can pickup some pocket change from photo sales I'll go to Deer Creek for the World of Outlaws and finish out that week in August at the Jackson Nationals. Aside from those shows, I'll shoot for the Kouba at Brainerd, Red Cedar and Rice Lake IRA as well as Friday and Saturday of the Elko dirt week. I would like to get back down to Sun Prairie for the Fireman's Nationals this year but that's a long ways off so we'll see how it goes.

So far it looks like I'll be able to put together a decent season of racing. Maybe not the highest numbers but I'll go to enough of them. I've got some home projects to tend to so some weeks are going to depend on how well the projects are going. Last year not only did a month and a half of racing fall victim to bad weather at the beginning of the season but the projects lost a month and a half as well. Next year I have to get some of those things done and at times it might come down to finishing my work or going racing. I'll time my projects so that I won't miss any of the big shows but a few of the weekly races might have to be put on the back burner.

I'm going to take some steps to simplify the photo posting on my website. They won't look any different but I'm going to cut out some of the post processing. Post processing only needs to be done when they're going to be used as prints but isn't necessary for the gallery. I'm still thinking about getting that lens I mentioned a while back. Even though it's a manual focus I think that I can work with it and get some good results. The GRP Trivia contest is scheduled to start next month so watch the message boards for more on that.

I'll try to post weekly and more often if anything new comes up.

Later,

Stan

I can't believe what's happening in the Twin Ports

2008-12-17T19:00:00.000-08:00

As you probably already know, the Superior Speedway recently announced that they will be a NASCAR affiliated track in 2009. Proctor Speedway has countered by suggesting that they might move to Friday nights and go head-to-head with Superior.

I can't believe that Wissota would allow Proctor to go head to head with Superior in an obvious attempt to put them out of business. What are they afraid of? They dominate practically all the racing from eastern Wisconsin to Montana. If they're as successful as they claim to be they should have nothing to fear and just let things play out. If this works for Superior it works, if it doesn't then maybe Superior will return to Wissota. Even if Superior is another sanction it's still good for racing to have both tracks operating in the area.

When it comes to auto racing facilities more tracks is always better. As auto racing enthusiasts the masses think of us all as a bunch of toothless rednecks so we're all in this together. The non-race-fan masses next to these tracks would like nothing better than for the racing community to implode from the inside over our petty differences. Congratulations Twin Ports, you're going to make the non-race-fan neighbors and politicians very happy if you keep bickering among yourselves resulting in the closure of one or both tracks. Once a track is lost to developers it will never come back and that's what's so disturbing about this whole thing.

I have only attended a few IRA shows, a WoO Gumout show and one Late Model special at Superior so I'm observing this madness from a distance. I have been to Proctor twice for a Wissota Sprint special and the Silver 1000. Last season I attended Wissota, Nascar, IMCA, unsanctioned, IRA, WoO, WDRL, Badger Midgets USMTS, USAC Pavement Midgets and a probably a few other sanctions that I'm forgetting. It's all good racing and everyone in the Twin Ports area will be affected if one of OR BOTH of these tracks ends up closing. That's right, I said both, it's going to be a tough economy and Friday night racing isn't necessarily an automatic ticket to success. People have to scramble to go racing after work and Friday crowds are never equal to those at most Saturday night tracks. A Split Friday crowd could backfire and adversely affect both Proctor and Superior.

Both Proctor and Superior are nice tracks with a long tradition. It would be a shame to see Wissota approve Proctor's proposed change to Friday night and end up having it blow up in their face. Personally I support my favorite tracks regardless of their sanctioning affiliation. Maybe down here by the Twin Cities we're a little bit more tolerant of that variety because we've got Cedar, Elko and Raceway (NASCAR) and Arlington (IMCA and one Wissota class) nearby. A short drive south and we're close to USRA Modifieds. When the southeast Minnesota tracks switched their Modifieds to USRA, when Bob Allen became an IMCA supporter and when Cedar Lake switched to NASCAR the sky didn't fall and the sun still came up the next morning.

Stan Meissner

NAVY DAVY'S SHOTS OF THE WEEK!!!

2008-12-14T16:38:00.000-08:00

".........in 2000 Bristol Motor Speedway laid dirt on the track and hosted the Dirt Late Models and World of Outlaw Sprints. The lates were on the first weekend. It was quite a sight to see. The track was wicked fast. I remember Thomas Ware rolling his car in turn one, climbing out and jumping up and down with his arms in the air happy at being the first LM driver to flip his car there. It was very dirty. The cars would raise the dirt and it settled in the crowd. With the bleachers completely surrounding the track the dirt had nowhere to go but on us. We were orange at nights end.
The track was so fast that with all the pressure on the right rear the rims were blowing apart. Mike Balzano had a huge lead in the feature when he was the first to lose his. Jimmy Mars was running great when his came apart. Several drivers suffered the same problem. They had a mandatory caution on lap 50. Dale McDowell who won this event found a crack in his right rear rim. They let them change tires.
It was great being there that weekend. It'll probably never happen again. This weeks shots come from that weekend. Some of our local guys showed up, Jerry Redetzke, Eric Pember, Jimmy Mars, John Bey, and Lance Mathees are few I can think of off the top of my head.
See you at the races in '09............."

NAVYDAVY'S SHOT OF THE WEEK!!!

2008-12-07T10:44:00.000-08:00

".........temps at or below zero, snow on the way, geeze must be winter. East Bay was on the Speed Channel Saturday. While I'm not much for TV racing it was good see the Lates going. It's been two months now since my last show at Tri-Oval.
I wonder what will become of racing now with the car companies in the trouble they're in. How will this effect NASCAR and in my opinion, even more important our local dirt tracks. With one in every ten workers attached to the auto industry what will happen if even one of the "Big Three" go under? It's not a pleasant thought.
This weeks shot comes from Kopellah and the streeters putting on another great show. Jeff Heintz leading Krista Swearingen and a three wide bunch behind her. That's Jimmy Randall on the outside.
See you at the races in '09........................"

Thursday December 4 thoughts...

2008-12-02T17:54:00.000-08:00

It's December 4th and I'm looking ahead to the 2009 racing season. Wow, it could be a rough one but I'm not sure at this point where media hype leaves off and reality starts. I was raised by depression era grandparents and was lectured daily about how rough things were for them during the 30's. They pounded it into my head to be thrifty and cautious about using credit and that has stayed with me my whole adult life. The media is telling us that this is the worst economic slowdown in many decades and the plight of the auto makers seems to underscore what they're saying. I've been through some slowdowns when unemployment got into the double digits and my job was a victim of one of those recessions. The core economy soldiered on and people needed an entertainment outlet to forget about the hard times during all those past slowdowns so there was still racing. We'll see what happens and hope for the best for all the hard working people out there. That's all we really can do when things happen that are beyond our control.

As far as my plans for 2009 go I'd like to try to hang onto my truck for (as long as it keeps running) so I can go another racing season without making payments. It's necessary for me to own and maintain two vehicles on one income and as anyone that knows me will testify I make due with what I have. The wife drives the nicer of the two vehicles and I get the Ranger without cruise or air but I prefer to drive the truck despite those inconveniences. If I wasn't putting every spare cent I have into chasin' racin' I would stay home and wouldn't need two sets of wheels. Anyways, if the old Ranger can hang in there for another year I'll be happy because it will help me to keep chasing races. It's always been a year to year thing with me that's contingent on my family circumstances as to whether I can keep doing this or not. So far so good but this season is shaping up to be a big challenge for everybody.

The plan this year is to write and/or submit photos to a variety of publications. I plan on continuing with my column for MRC and doing an occasional article for other publications. I'll be sending pictures to MRC, Hawkeye, Flat Out and an occasional shot to All The Dirt on nights when there aren't any ATD or track photographers on hand. I plan on continuing with the gotomn website but don't have any major expansion or improvements planned. I have been doing my website since late 1996 (got the gotomn domain in 1999) and I don't think at this time that it's very relevant anymore. Not that it ever was very relevant (LOL) but early on it got a lot more attention than it does now. Back when the internet was new, most people still didn't have home computers so it was a more tight knit group of hard core fans and most of the racing sites were hobby sites like mine. As time went on more commercial sites came online and the original hobby sites like mine either became businesses or fizzled out. Actually, I think maybe with the tight economy some of the sponsored sites might have a tough go of it and it could affect the printed publications as well. Provided that things don't get too difficult for me personally and I can keep gotomn online maybe there will be a bigger niche for it in the future. On the other hand maybe I'll get tired of it or I won't be able to sustain it anymore. But the bottom line is that I don't plan on making any big changes to the website. We'll be doing the GRP Trivia Contest next month and I'll be doing a little bit of updating as time permits.

Screen savers...arghhh!!! Man, those things are a lot of work so I'm not sure if I'll be doing them or not this year. Maybe just a few computer backgrounds this time around. I'm really not sure with everyone switching to Vista if people still use screen savers or not. Mine have been tested in Vista and they work but they stopped updating the screen saver program I'm using and I was never very happy with the photo resolution. I'd use some great shots to create my savers then I'd import them into the savers and the program would degrade the quality of the photos so they didn't look anywhere near as good as what I intended. Besides, it's a lot of time and work involved to create them. We'll see, maybe the mood will hit me and I'll put something together before the contest.

Preliminary plans are to do a schedule pretty close to what I have done the past few years. As far at travel, last season I attended a USAC Midget race at La Crosse, a couple of races at Jackson, and the WoO at NCS and Princeton. I went to Chateau at Lansing for a USMTS race and I liked that track so I'll try to get down there for the USMTS again. The crowd at La Crosse wasn't very good so I don't expect them to invite USAC back again and that's a shame because it was an awesome race. I'll try to get down to Jackson a couple times and would like to go to Sun Prairie for the Fireman's National again. Aside from those shows I'll be going to Cedar Lake and some UMSS races at Kopellah. Pretty much the same thing I have been doing. Once every few years I'll take a trip to Knoxville but with the old truck I'm not able to travel much.

Well, that's going to about do it for this blog entry. I was posting every day there for a while but that's a difficult thing to keep up. I'll try to put something on here once a week or so to let you all know what's going on. I realize you're not hanging on the edge of your seat wondering what I'm up to but I consider this like a chat with friends.

Later!

Busy weekend...Saturday OT, painting and the Vike's game...

2008-11-23T09:30:00.000-08:00

I worked a few hours of OT on Saturday then had a paint brush thrust into my hands when I got home. It's a good thing that I stocked up on beer and B Movies so I had something enjoyable to do later in the evening. Two of three movies worked in our DVD player but the one that looked the most entertaining is that one that didn't work. It was a football movie and I believe I heard somewhere that the team it was based on was the Duluth Eskimos in the early 1900's. In fact I think they might have shot some footage up in the Twin Ports. Anyways, that movie decided it didn't want to load. The other two were of the Sci Fi genre, the first being a shootum up with aliens and the second was billed as being based about the Phoenix Lights incident of '97 but didn't prove to be factual to the event it was based on. If you're not familiar with the Phoenix Lights incident in '97 you'd do well to do some research on what happened there. Long story but a very interesting experience worth the read. We're not alone. I'm convinced of that.

I have been going through some of my photos from the 2008 season and used one to create this windows wallpaper in 1024x768 resolution. I like the composition of this shot taken with the 500mm down the entire length of the backstretch at Cedar Lake. I had taken my first shots during hotlaps up in turn four and worked my way around the parameter of the track as the light changed until I ended up in this spot. A few minutes after this shot was taken I lost my light and had to pack it up for the night and put the flash on. In manual mode you're looking at the viewfinder and pretty much eyeballing what you see, guessing your settings as the light changes as you keep moving towards the available light. It's an "on your toes" sort of shooting but you can catch a few sweet shots in the process. If you want to maximize the number of good shots you get you wouldn't try something like this but if you're looking for something unique it's worth gambling on.

Not bad for a $150 lens

It's interesting to read the reviews on this lens. Most people complain that they could not get any sharp images with it. I'm kind of hesitant to admit it but I have taken quite a few photos with this lens that have appeared in racing papers and magazines. Kind of reminds me of what my cousin used to say about his race car, "it ain't the chrome that make's it go." The same could be said about my camera equipment, I try to get the most out of what I've got.

The conspiracy has begun. The usual winter time bantering about the Superior Speedway and what sanction they will use in the coming season. There are a bunch of threats that something like 40 drivers won't compete there if they don't stay with Wissota. My take? As long as they have their Sprint specials I don't give a #^%@ what they do for their weekly deal. As a matter of fact I haven't made it up there for the Northern Nationals for a couple of years so it's really not a matter of concern at all for me anymore. At one time I enjoyed going up to Superior but I had some hassles at the gate and difficulty getting vacation on race days so I haven't been up there for a while. They were on my schedule this year but I think they must have canceled their spring IRA race because I never got up there. Maybe it was the weather, I don't remember. At one time I considered Sprint Car racing at Superior a must see event but kind of lost interest. That happens for me whenever a track loses "the list" and I have to deal with that king of thing. Maybe we'll get back up there now that Butch has the track again.

Another interesting topic on the boards. One central 100. Again, who cares? Just go to whatever is most convenient and fits your circumstances. I go to the Legendary 100 because it's CLS and you can never go wrong by attending a multi-day CLS show. Others my disagree but CLS invented the 100 and is legendary in that respect.

We'll, there's a lot more things to rant about but I'm going to tend to other matters now. Later!!!

NAVY DAVY'S SHOT OF THE WEEK!!!

2008-11-23T09:07:00.000-08:00

".......after as cold a week as we've had it's hard to think about anything but staying warm. For the most part racing is over across the nation for '08. Which brings to mind this question, what lays in store for '09 with the economy in such bad shape?
Will car counts be down? Will tracks beable to stay open? The only bright spot I see is gas prices tumbling. How long will this last? I know I'm staying around home a lot more these days. To bad they waited til the race season was over.
This weeks shot comes from 2004 at the Red Cedar Speedway. Tony Bahr, Luke Rofers, and Rick Hanestead coming out of turn two. Hanestead "tire hopped" Rofers and spun out. It ended his night.
See you at the races in '09................."

Thursday Nov 20, 2008 thoughts...

2008-11-20T18:04:00.000-08:00

Three Wide Media publisher of Flat Out Illustrated, Dirt Lake Model and Dirt Modified have a special offer going right now. You can subscribe for an entire year to all three for $60 or pick two for an entire year for $42. I subscribe to Flat Out and Dirt Late Model so I'll have to take a look and see what my expiration dates are. That's a great deal so if you're not subscribing to any of these publications this is a great opportunity.

There has been a lot of chatter on the websites lately about a variety of issues. I'll skip the non-racing stuff for the time being and get right into what seems to be a developing controversy among Sprint fans. The controversy is whether 410 or 360 racing is better. From my point of view they're both fun to watch but 410's, especially the Outlaws, do tend to string out in single file during most of the Heats that I have seen. They're pure speed and it takes a tremendous talent to tame one but some of the side by side racing has been sacrificed. On the other hand, 360's offer more side by side racing but they're a few ticks slower on the stop watch.

The way I look at it the 360's we see today are faster than the cars many of the legends of the sport drove in their time. I saw some great drivers turning laps times that would have bored some of the current crop of pure speed fans. I that being a Late Model and Modified fan in addition to Sprints it has made me appreciate how entertaining good side by side racing can be. Then there's non-wing Sprints, they're in a league of their own. If you have never seen non-wing Sprints or Midgets you've got to make it a point to see them.

But where was I? Oh yeah, talking about the 410's and 360's. It's all good racing, some people have one favorite class, others like some variety. Whatever works for you.

I'll be writing more thoughts as I get time. Later!

NAVY DAVY'S SHOT OF THE WEEK!!!

2008-11-16T09:05:00.000-08:00

".....this weeks shot goes back to 2000, it was another of our mega trips. Three weekends and two weeks on the road. It started with the "Show Me" at West Plains Mo. We got there in time for the Thursday night practice and the great BBQ dinner. Due to rain both Friday and Saturday they ran the whole show on Sunday. Ray Cook was the winner that year. After staying with Merry's sister for a few days we were off to Bristol TN. That was the year they laid dirt on the track and brought in the Late Models. I have a cousin who live about 30 miles away and we stayed with them a few days. We then left for the holy grail of dirt tracks-Eldora for the "Dream 100". On the way we stopped at CJ Rayburn's shop in Indiana. Billy Moyer and Don O'Neal were prepping their cars for Eldora and we talked with them and of course CJ. It was quite a trip and seeing three of the biggest races that year was great.
This weeks shot is Gary Stolba, Jimmy Mars, and Edwin Wells during a heat race.
See at the races in '09..........."

Another month goes by without a blog post by Stan...

2008-11-14T09:05:00.000-08:00

I'm on vacation today so I have been spending a few hours cleaning up computer files and surfing online. One thing that has been on my mind lately is that I dropped the ball and all but stopped posting to this blog. I guess you could say that my level of passion for racing goes up and down. This time of the year I usually like to take a break from racing but I never stop thinking about it. I have been watching the economy lately and thinking about what effect that's going to have on all of us, not just on racing. I'm not going to get into politics or finger pointing because I don't think that's a constructive way to solve problems. You won't see any predictions from me because I simply don't know. I just try to go with the flow and do my best.

If you were following this blog when I was posting almost daily you probably are thinking that Navy Davy has hijacked it. No, that isn't the case, it only takes me a minute to post his "Shot of the Week" and comments as opposed to me coming up with something to blog about and finding the time to post it. I have been doing some photo work and spent quite a bit of my free time working on a magazine article and other writing obligations. Now that they have been completed I am going to try to get more into the habit of blogging on a regular basis. I'll see if I can come up with some ideas.

I'm considering another lens purchase during the off season. I was very happy with the 85mm f1.8 fixed focal length lens I bought last winter. You're probably all familiar with what a zoom lens is. Most racing photographers like a zoom for a variety of reasons and one of the most popular is the Nikon 70-200mm f2.8 VR. It's a great lens but it's heavy and costs around $1,600 new. I can't justify the purchase of a $1,600 lens when I'm driving around in a truck that's worth about that same amount. In addition to being more expensive zoom lenses aren't as sharp as fixed focal point lenses and most prime lenses are faster. The lower the f stop number the faster the lens so an f2.8 is fast, an f2 is faster and an f1.8 is even faster. Sigma makes a nice 50-150mm f2.8 that currently sells for around $700-$800. Last winter I spent close to that for the 85mm, a new camera bag and several other incidental accessories. I'm not in a position to shell out that kind of money this off season but I have found an alternative.

First I should point out that fixed focal length lenses like my 85mm are what is commonly called a "prime" lens. The advantage of a prime lens over a zoom is that you get sharper images. The disadvantage is obviously that you can only focus at one distance. For example, my 85mm is great for catching those 2 and 3 wide shots both day and night. On the other hand, if a Sprint Car is running way up by the wall I can get a sharp image but it doesn't fill the frame adequately. I do have a budget priced 70-300mm f4.5-5.6 zoom, the cheaper zooms aren't fast (f2.8) and the further you zoom out the slower they become. As far as image quality the cheap lenses can often provide results comparable to pro lenses within a partial range of their zoom capabilities. My 70-300mm is great from around 85-220mm but anything beyond that range is too far to get the image quality I want and that lens is only good until the light starts to fall off.

On a typical night if it's sunny I'll take some outside the track shots with the 70-300mm during hotlaps then run down to the infield and shoot with it during the Heats. Next I'll switch to my 85mm and either shoot with that one for the rest of the night or switch to my 28-105mm f2.8 Tamron for the Features if victory lane is tight quarters. The Tamron 28-105mm was $800 new but I regret that purchase because it's not good for action shots. I have learned it's strengths and weaknesses and can get acceptable results with it but I only use it when I'm at a place where there are cramped quarters and the 85mm won't work for victory lane.

The addition I'd like to make to my collection this year is a Nikon 135mm f2.8 E IA-S manual focus lens. This lens was originally made for Nikon film cameras and is still sold new at several online outlets. The 135mm will mount on my digital but I have to shoot entirely in manual mode and focus manually. It's a "prime lens" and the reviews say that sharpness is outstanding. I would only use it during the Heats and B Mains, the 135mm will give me enough reach to get some better sideways angles and to catch those Sprints when they're up by the wall. This lens costs about $190 delivered as compared to $700-$1,600 for a good quality fast zoom lens. Manual focus is tricky. What you have to do is focus on a specific spot and take your photos when the cars "hit your mark" at exactly the right moment. Consequently, your "keeper ratio" isn't going to be as good as it's going to be with a zoom. I'd estimate that with the 85mm I'm getting 70% to 80% keepers (in focus) shots. With the manual focus my keepers are probably going to drop down to about 50% depending on the track, lighting, dust in the air, etc. So you can see why the 135mm would be something I'd only use for part of the evening and not at every race.

You'd probably be surprised to know that one of the tracks I need more reach for is Princeton. From the stands that might not make sense but in spite of it's small size you've got to stand back further to be safe and it's a wide track with high banking so distance can be a problem. Besides Princeton a couple other places where you need the reach are the big tracks like Jackson and Knoxville. I will rarely if ever shoot at Knoxville and seldom get down to Jackson but a little more distance will help at those places. I think that considering the cost of less than $200 I can justify a lens that I'm not going to be using all the time. The 70-200mm and 80-200mm high buck lenses aren't close enough for some of the tighter victory lane areas so I don't see myself ever buying one of those.

Besides the 135mm prime I've got my eyes on another prime lens as well. It's the Nikon 50mm f1.8 standard lens that sells for a little over $100. I found out that I like opening up the 85mm wide open to f1.8 and taking some wide angle shots with it. I get great results of full fields going into the first turn, four wide salutes and that sort of thing. Another application where I like f1.8 is when they line up all the cars on the front stretch and introduce the drivers. A 50mm f1.8 prime would give me a wider angle and it's a good lens for non-racing stuff too so eventually I'd like to add one of those so that I have three prime lenses.

That's about all the prime lenses I want to carry because changing lenses when it's dusty exposes your sensor and you can get dust on it. I have a "Sensor Scope" cleaning kit and I clean my sensor pretty often during the racing season. An easy way to see if you have dust on your sensor is to lock your camera in manual focus and take several photos of the blue sky. If there is dust on the sensor you'll see little spots in the same place on every photo. Dust and moisture are two things that you have to deal with when taking racing photos. I carry a plastic bag so I can cover my camera if it starts raining and a towel so I can wipe it off. I also like to cut up old t-shirts and use that type of cotton material to clean my lens during the evening because they don't leave scratches. It works great for cleaning off the lenses on my reading glasses as well.

Well, that's about all I've got for now. When I buy the 135mm, probably as we get closer to the racing season, I'll post some test shots. I turned the auto focus off on one of my lenses recently and practiced focusing manually. The photos turned out good enough that I'm confident I can get some good shots with a manual focus prime lens. Some racing photographers only shoot with manual focus so it's not impossible but it takes some practice. The focusing rings on manual focus lenses are a little more precise and forgiving than the ones on the auto focus lenses. You can turn the auto focus off and manual focus and auto focus lens but they're not as precise as a dedicated manual focus lens. I forgot to mention that I have a fixed 500mm manual focus lens that I sometimes like to use for outside the track shots. It's an f8 lens so I can only use it for hotlaps during the time of the summer when it stays light the longest. The lens isn't a Nikon so none of the focus assist or metering works. With the 135mm the focusing dot in the viewfinder should work which should make it easier to shoot with than my 500mm. I have gotten some pretty good shots on full manual no metering with the 500m. I like using it once in a while because I can get some neat angles, here's a sample:

Like I said, this lens is 100% manual and has to be used in good lighting. The fastest f stop is f8 but I get my sharpest images at f11 or slower. Also, I have to use 1/500th shutter speed when the cars are coming at me head on like this. Usually I can get away with half as much shutter speed but in this case I have to speed it up a little. In daylight I have an advantage because I can hold the shutter button and take two or three shots in quick succession. I won't have that luxury at night when using flash because of the recycle times.

Well, that's going to do it. Hope I didn't bore you too much with photo geek talk.

NAVY DAVY'S SHOT OF THE WEEK!!!

2008-11-09T10:31:00.000-08:00

"........this weeks shot comes from Hales Corner near Milwaukee in 2001. We were on quite a tour that year. We followed the UMP Summer Series and the Hav A Tampa Series for a week. We started at Brownstown Indiana on a Friday. Saturday found us at Kentucky Lake near Calvert City KY then the next day it was off to Danville Ill, from there it was Hales Corner. We then jumped off the UMP tour and headed for Davenport Iowa for the Hav A Tampa race. Wednesday was a travel day with no racing on our way home to Cedar Lake Speedway for three days. Our final stop on this tour was Shawano WI for another "HAT" race.
This weeks shot is Scott James hiking it up at Hales Corner. Hales Corner closed a few years ago. I heard Menards bought the property. The track and facilities were very shabby. Rough track, shoddy facilities. Very unimpressive. Still I'm glad I got to see a show there.
See You at the races in '09...................."

NAVY DAVY'S SHOT OF THE WEEK!!!

2008-11-02T08:36:00.000-08:00

"........the racing season has been over for a few weeks now here in the Northland. Saturday night Speed had a live World of Outlaws event bringing both the Sprints and Lates together for their finale. It was fun watching a dirt event on TV. Josh "Kid Rocket" Richards won the Late Model feature and Fargo's Donny Schatz won the Sprint feature. The track looked good and racey and it was.
Since I just completed my tenth full year of race photography I thought it would be fun to go back and find some interesting shots from those past years. It's been a lot of fun being out there. The middle of the track offers some interesting perspectives that you don't see from the stands. In a way it puts you in the action. I know I've had to run from errant cars a few times.
This weeks shot comes from 2004 at Cedar Lake, going down the back stretch three wide are Joel Cryderman, Jeff Martire, and Paul Brust.
See you at the races in 2009....................."

Sorting things out after the season...

2008-10-16T18:35:00.000-07:00

Judging by the dwindling number of message board posts on all of the racing boards people have shifted into post season mode. That's my situation right now too, I'm kind of taking a little break from being absorbed in racing. Well, not exactly a break as I'm busy with a writing project. Tonight I'm trying to locate a couple of old "Race Show" DVD's with a specific driver interview that I need a quote from. Those darned DVD's were sitting here on my desk, not just for weeks but for a couple of years and now I can't find them. Who knows where they ran off to...

A week from Saturday (25th) the first UMSS meeting will be held at the Settlement just north of Somerset at 11:30am. I'm looking forward to seeing what everybody has to say about this deal and how much interest there is. I'll be writing a lot more about it over the off season.

Well, I better see if I can figure out where that DVD went. Later.

NAVY DAVY'S SHOT OF THE WEEK!!!

2008-10-12T12:01:00.000-07:00

".........the tracks are all silent now. We closed our '08 season at that little three corner bullring known as Tri-Oval Speedway for the "Great Pumpkin Races.On an unseasonably warm night the action was hot. Three Superstock drivers going for the Wissota National point title were there. Ross "Roscoe"Dixon finished third in the feature and takes the title back to Ramona South Dakota. Bob Timm won the USRA Mod feature. Also on hand were Streetstocks, Midwest Mods, Vintage cars, and Hornets. A scary moment near the end of the Hornet feature saw a nasty roll over. They had to call in the Fountain City F.D. to extricate the driver from the car. It was a long night with many yellows but the racing was good. It was great to see all my racing pals for one last time this season. Mean Gene, Hoosiers Up, and of course Zimmy. Talked with a lot drivers and fans and had an enyoyable night. Even Zimmy found a new freind. See you at the races in 2009......."

NAVY DAVY'S SHOT OF THE WEEK!!!

2008-10-05T13:03:00.000-07:00

".....we made our first trip to Deer Creek Saturday. It was a beautiful Fall day. The racing at "The Creek" was pretty good. The Midwest Mod feature was won by about a foot by Al Wytaske. Close racing all night long in all classes. Bob Timm won a hard fought Mod race, Ross Dixon from Ramona South Dakota took the national points lead over Curt Myers by one point by winning the Superstock feature. Mike Prochnow made it look easy in the Late Model feature. Redetzke and Brent Larson had a great race for second. Larson got the spot. At 9:30 the races were over and they played "I did it my way" by Ole Blue Eyes as we all left for the last time in '08. This weeks shot is th of a fierce battle in the Mod feature. See you at Tri-Oval next Saturday for the final races of the '08 season................"

Got out of the blogging habit

2008-10-05T12:45:00.000-07:00

I got out of the blogging habit the past few weeks so I'm going to try to get at it more often now that my season is over. The last race around here is the Tri-Oval and as of now I don't plan to go but that could change before the end of the week. It will depend on the weather and what the family is up to. I've got enough cash left over from this weekend that I could do it so we'll see.

Right now I'm recording the 'Dega Cup race on the DVR and am working on some photos. I'm not in a rush to post my Outlaw photos on gotomn because I doubt that anybody from the WoO is going to look at the website of some hack way up in Minnesota. The WoO used my victory lane photos from NCS and Princeton on their website and that was cool. It was an honor to know that people world wide will see my pics. In addition to using my photos I noticed that the Outlaws stayed at the track to greet the fans and that left a good impression on me. I've talked to the people at a couple of the tracks and they all tell me that the people running the series now are a pleasure to work with. That's a good thing and I'm happy to see them taking some positive steps in that direction.

I've got to do some photo editing and a few other things but I'm going make an effort to post here more often. By the way, what classes were they running at Tri-Oval? LOL

In case anyone is wondering where I've been...

2008-09-30T19:34:00.000-07:00

Doing a lot of photo processing and researching information for an article and my monthly MRC online column. I've got some photo orders to tend to during the next few days as well. There were three nights of racing last weekend and two more this weekend then I'll be done until next year.

I will make a longer post when time permits.

Monday, Monday, how ya' doin'?

2008-09-22T16:10:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I have typed a blog entry so I better get busy and catch up with posting my most recent thoughts and experiences.

This past Saturday night I went to Husets Speedway with Chuck Priefer and Dick Kelly. I think they got sick of me talking so I guess they better never go on a racing trip with me and GRP. It took four days to Eldora and back before we finally stopped talking racing. (insert LOL) Seriously though, I enjoy traveling with fellow racing fans and sharing our stories and experiences.

There can be no doubt that Husets is an action track. By way of example, some years I'll go all season without catching a photo of a Sprint Car flip. One night at Husets resulted in a three shot sequence of Donavan Peterson going over as well as two other flips. From an action standpoint it's wild.

Saturday was only my third time at Husets and the first time I have spent the entire night taking photos there. The only other time I took pics there was hotlaps during daylight with my old film camera. Shooting there for the first time with the digital and flash was quite the challenge. Up here at familiar tracks I've got the settings all figured out and a night of shooting goes pretty smooth. At Husets I struggled with the cramped quarters and color balance settings. For some reason I always have problems getting it set right when a track has black dirt. I managed to get some decent photos but they weren't my best work but I'm a self critic so they probably look decent to others. Shooting pics is kind of like driving a race car, you're probably not going to come into another guy's home territory and nail the setup on your first try. I was working with some new more powerful flash batteries and the additional power made a difference in brightness. I'll have to keep that in mind this weekend at Cedar Lake or I'll be doing a lot of post processing on Sunday.

Chuck was standing around talking to Doug Wolfgang so I stopped and stood around with a dumb look on my face. I get tongue tied around Wolfie and can't even tell you why. Maybe it's because he was one of my heroes while he was driving but I still get nervous around Wolfgang. I have always wanted to ask him if he really used to ask Tom Wilke if he could scrape the mud off the 87 car when he was a kid. Tom told me that but Tom never hesitated to bullshit me so I can't be sure. I'll probably never know because I don't think I'll ever work up enough balls to ask Wolfgang an off the wall question like that. He's a helluva guy, his observations are priceless. He's just a regular guy just like the rest of us trying to make sure his family does right and putting food on the table for them. That's the second time I've seen Wolfie this summer and the second time I chickened out and didn't say anything to him.

Doug Clark gave me shit about falling on my ass when I crossed the track. I didn't have any problem taking a shot back at him when he tip toed across the same spot a while later. Clark is easy for me to talk to and he invited a rebuttal by taking the first shot across the bow. I met him at one of the Gopher 50's in Owatonna years ago. He's a nice guy but giving people shit must be what they do for entertainment down in Sioux Falls because he sure handed me a full ration of it. That's alright by me, I like a dry sense of humor. Not everybody can say that Doug Clark gave them shit. Probably just a few Outlaw drivers who got sent to the back for jumping a start and a couple dumb assed photographers like me attempting to transverse a wet track.

I ran into Jimmy Schmidt, my wife's aunt's brother. He builds motors out of a shop in Flandreau. I wouldn't have even recognized him but he walked by with a lawn chair that had his name written on it in magic marker. He might as well have had a damn sign on his forehead, "I'm Jimmy Schmidt." Here's your sign! LOL It was nice seeing him and I'll sent his regards back to Dick and Barb.

The first UMSS meeting is tentatively slated for Saturday October 25. I plan on attending and listening to what their plans are. I'm not an authority on motor rules, tire compounds, that sort of thing but I'm familiar with the MSA of eastern Wisconsin and know they've got a good deal over there. I think this deal will be good for the Sprint teams and it will help out some of the promoters that can't afford to book an ASCS, IRA or Outlaw show. We've got a lot of tracks around this area that fall into that category and they know a Sprint show might draw more fans but aren't able to book one. This might give them that opportunity. The IMCA had some Jackpot Junction series shows this year at Jackson and Kasson that I attended on other nights of the week but they run Arlington on Saturday nights. That makes it difficult to run a JJ show at another Saturday track. Just like everyone else the IMCA teams are fighting increased travel expenses. I think this deal at Cedar Lake, maybe Kopellah and a couple other tracks in that area might work out pretty good. The people organizing this want to generate interest among Street Stock, Super Stock, Midwest Modified drivers that would like to try Sprints. Sprints are never cheap but this deal will make it possible for more people go get involved. Sprint Car racing in eastern Minnesota and western Wisconsin will die out if new drivers don't get involved.

Brooke Tatnell in the Forbrook 5 was leading the Cheater's Day A Main while Mark Dobmeier in the Lunstra 13 worked his way through traffic to second. Mark caught Brooke and got underneath him coming out of turn two. They got together on the backstretch sending Tatnell into a wall scraping pirouette ending his run. Guy Forbrook wasn't very happy with Mark and expressed his displeasure to Dobmeier as he approached victory lane. This was one of those racing deals where you really don't know if one of them slipped or it was on purpose. I have never met Mark but I can't imagine a driver who subbed for Brooke in the Volcano Joe's car at Wilmot

Brooke would be catching a 5am flight the next morning to meet up with the Craig Dollansky team in New York. Craig's arm was broken in an Eldora crash that some have described as the worst they have seen there in 20 years. I wish Craig a speedy recovery and congrats to Brooke for getting the opportunity. When I heard about Craig's misfortune right away I knew Brooke was the best candidate to fill in based on his driving talent, easy going nature and close proximity to Craig's shop. He's been running his own limited deal and subbing in various cars all season so this is a good opportunity to get some WoO exposure. Hopefully he'll have some good finishes and keep his name out there for the next time something opens up. Personally I think if Guy and Brooke could get some sponsorship to run a full or partial Outlaw schedule they'd be a force to be reckoned with. I wish some Minnesota based business would take note of this sponsorship opportunity and come on board.

That's going to do it for tonight. I'll add some more later this week during the Badger Nationals. This should be a good show.

NAVY DAVY'S SHOT OF THE WEEK!!!

2008-09-22T16:03:00.000-07:00

".........what a great weekend. Perfect weather both Friday and Saturday. The pits at Red Cedar Speedway over flowing with cars for the 29th Annual Punky Manor Challenge of Champions. Friday night with the Midwest Mods on hand there were nearly 200 cars on hand. So many in fact they were pitting in the infield. Friday was a full show for the midwest mods and heats for the Supers, Mods, and Lates. A very enjoyable night.
Saturday they ran two B-mains for the Supers, Mods, and Late Models. Great racing there. Then it was off to the features. Friday night they ran the MWM feature and Shane Halopka came from 17th to take the win. A very impressive run. Also Friday night they ran The Debbie's and Bongo Dash for the Late Models which was won by Harry Hanson. Saturday's features started with the Superstocks. Shawn Huse in the 1H car was strong and took the win. Craig Thatcher remains nearly unbeatable at Red Cedar. It was his at least his 8th Punky win. John Kaanta got the Late Model win with Harry Hanson second and a fast moving Jimmy Mars third.
All in all it was a great way to end my 2008 season behind the camera. I'll be in the stands at Cedar Lake next weekend to kick back and watch some racing sitting on my butt. That will be it for 2008 as I have other things planned in October. The 2008 season was shorter for me this year with all the early season rainouts. Doesn't seem right we are once again at the end.
This weeks shot comes from the Modified feature at Red Cedar. See you at the races............."

NAVY DAVY'S SHOT OF THE WEEK!!!

2008-09-14T15:34:00.000-07:00

"............Mother Nature once again has not been kind to us this weekend. Two of the four days of "The Legendary 100" at Cedar Lake have been washouts. Wednesday night was Midwest Mod and Streetstock night and that went off good. Thursday a steady rain most of the day and then a persistent drizzle wiped us out. All I got for my efforts that night was about two pounds of mud on my shoes. Friday night was great. Cool temps and a mostly clear night made for a fast and racy track as the Late Models, Modifieds,Superstocks,Pure Stocks,and hornets took to the track. It was the hornets first ever appearance at CLS. With the pits full to overflowing it was as good a night as I've seen there. There was some excellent racing and the fans definitely got their moneys worth. Saturday was another story. Once again the steady afternoon rain cancelled the days events. Since Thursday was a washout they ran that show Friday night. Friday nights show was to be run at noon on Saturday. They got two Superstock heats in and once again old Ma Nature stepped in. Today now they plan to wrap the weekend up. Once again Ma Nature threatens to step in so I'm staying put.
Next weekend is the "Punky Manor Challenge of Champions" at the Red Cedar Cedar Speedway in Menomonie.
This weeks shot come from the front stretch at Cedar Lake Friday night. See you at the races..........."

Sunday morning vacation week recap...

2008-09-14T08:26:00.000-07:00

I scheduled this week for vacation way back in January when the seniority list went around so here's a recap of how the week went.

On Saturday September 6th I attended the Jerry Richert Memorial at Cedar Lake. Despite about an hour rain delay they managed to get the entire show in. Due to the rain delay we weren't able to pop open our first barley pop until the stroke of midnight. The JR Memorial is an annual camping weekend and we enjoyed the camping experience and post race BBQ put on by the Richert family. If not for the rain delay we'd have been done a lot earlier and had more time to enjoy the post race festivities. Just once I'd like to see the racing conclude at 10:30pm but it wasn't to be this year. Maybe next time. The all night partying is getting to me a little more each season and it's getting harder to recover. I made it to something like 3:30 or 4am but didn't check the time because I couldn't see my cell phone clearly.

Sunday was a recoup day from the JR. I must have got home around 10am but again didn't take note of the exact time. The rest of the day was spent unpacking and cleaning camera equipment, editing photos and watching a little television. I fell asleep early in the recliner.

Monday? The only thing I remember about Monday was going on a long walk and watching the Vikes fiasco. I suppose that I spent some computer time catching up with photos and such. The day doesn't stand out but that's what vacation is for, to unwind. One does not have to be chasing a race or doing anything special to relax. I think I might have had a few beers that day because I had some left over from the JR.

On Tuesday I finally got around to cutting and installing some base board that my wife had stained months ago when we redid our bedroom. We have a powered miter saw so the job went off without a hitch and it looks pretty good. I ran up to Menards and got a couple of 36" laminate pre finished sliding closet doors and track so we put those up. The only problem I ran into was that the doors were about 1/2" too long so I had to cut that much off the bottom. The doors are hollow core but the bottom inner core was longer than 1/2" so it worked out perfect. I have cut a little off the bottom of doors before. You have to use masking tape so the saw blade doesn't splinter the door. What I did to get a perfect cut was clamp a straight piece of board across the bottom of the door as a guide for the skill saw. When we were done we lightly touched up the cut edges with steel wool and presto, a perfectly straight cut that you can't even tell we did.

Wednesday, another day spent wrapping up a few things around the house. The wife has been on call all week for one of her Doula clients so we couldn't do anything special like spending a night at Hinckley. Her client is going to deliver down at Regions in downtown St. Paul so she didn't want to go anywhere. Besides, when she has a birth pending there's no drinks allowed if we were to go anywhere and she's on edge wondering when the phone will ring. That pretty much kept Debbie occupied for the whole week so aside from eating together and saying hi and bye on the way to and from races I didn't see much of her. She spend a good deal of the time doing research down in her office. We've got some family issues with one of our daughters that have been keeping us on the edge of our seats as well. I hope that works out but it's not something I have any control over. Our door is always open but the older we get the more difficult it gets to give up our privacy.

Wednesday, night one of the Legendary 100 and I was looking forward to four nights of racing. The racing in the Street Stocks and Midwest Modifieds was excellent with two exciting Features. These guys aren't the top classes anywhere and they don't race for a huge chunk of money but close racing is always fun to watch. I got home late and stayed up until almost 3am uploading pics to my website. My four and a half year old rechargeable batteries that I use in my flash and power pack were giving me trouble and went dead after only 100 shots. Fortunately I was carrying eight fully charged spares so I continue shooting with four in the flash only. It doesn't recycle as fast but I could still take one shot per lap of the Features and victory lane photos.

Thursday, day two of the Legendary 100. I made the rounds going to Fleet Farm, Menards, Home Depot, Office Max and Northern Tool that morning looking for replacement batteries. I have used a 15 minute charger the past five seasons which works especially well when camping out. Unfortunately Rayovac discontinued the product line so I was forced to consider something else. After running around to the stores and calling the Battery Store I decided to wait until after the season was over. That night the rains came and we all ended up waiting around to see what would happen. The rain eventually stopped and it looked like we might get the show in but right around that time a steady mist that didn't even appear on the radar forced CLS to cancel. They rescheduled the Thursday preliminary to noon Saturday. The pits and infield were a muddy mess.

Friday went pretty well. I decided that I'd have to settle for overnight rechargeables so I went to Walmart and picked up another overnight charger that had two in the package and an additional eight pack to make the total of 10 that I would need. I put them on the chargers and would have to try to get by one more night with the old ones. CLS ran something like 17 Heat races, B Mains and Features. It was a wild night with one Mod tearing down a section of catch fence and snapping the posts right off. There were several other roll overs during the course of the evening so it was a wild night. It was a late night as well and it was going on 2am by the time I got home. The racing went well past midnight so I'm sure the track ended up having to pay a fine for going past curfew. I haven't had a cold in over a year but I started to notice that my throat was getting scratchy and that my nose was a little runny. D*mn, this might not be much fun if it gets any worse. In the meantime my 15 minute batteries only lasted for about 50 shots but I had plenty of backup to finish the night.

Saturday the weather was overcast, damp, humid, cool and clammy. I quickly took a shower, pumped down a couple of cups of mud and put my new batteries in the camera and auxiliary power pack. Unfortunately as it would turn out I didn't get an opportunity to test them at the track. I felt run down and my throat was sore when I woke up and I was getting an irritating tickle so I had to cough once in a while. The cold was obviously getting worse and the weather was not going to help it any. I stopped at a nearby convenience store to get some cough drops then drove through rain all the way from Forest Lake to Osceola. By some miracle it wasn't raining south of Osceola but the skies didn't look good. I got out to the track around 11:15am, signed in, made some quick rounds then ran out and got my camera, long lens and monopod to try some outside shots. They must have been in a rush because they went right into the Canadian and American anthems without hot lapping. They got three Super Stock Heats in the books before it started drizzling. I put the camera away and walked over to where Dan Plan, Vinster and Rick Blewitt were camping. Navy Davy was there with his wife Mary and they invited me to go to the Cedar Creek bar for a burger. I had a couple of beers and a tasty burger and it appeared to have stopped raining. We went back to the track and heard that they had been wheel packing but unfortunately it started raining around the time we arrived. After waiting around a couple more hours in the cool mist (great for my cold...NOT!!!) they canceled until Sunday afternoon. By this time it was obvious I wasn't going to be feeling very well the next morning so I decided I wasn't going to go back on Sunday.

So here I sit on Sunday morning with a sore throat, runny nose and that zonked feeling one gets with a cold. The weather didn't look any better this morning so I checked the CLS website and they canceled the Sunday afteroon race due to wet grounds. The pits were a mess and they're probably still pulling haulers out of the mud with the grader as I type this blog entry.

I was looking forward to seeing all the 100 Features and the Sprint Cars on Saturday night. But I only lost a few hours of my time and the irony of rainouts is that I had the opportunity to talk to some people and get to know them better. You too Jason!!! LOL So my loss really wasn't a loss because anytime I can get to know people it's good. The Saturday night crowd is always the best at the 100 so Cedar Lake did not have a good week. I'm sure some of the internet idiots are going to be blaming them for the weather but any reasonable person knows they did the very best they could. I felt bad for them because I talked to a couple of the owners as well as the track prep people a lot during the course of the weekend. Besides the weather they dealt with torn down catch fences, a very muddy pit area and a lot of unhappy people looking for someone or something to blame. Believe me, I would not want that job but as they say "it is what it is" so that's the hand we have been dealt. All they can do is pick up the pieces sand hope that their remaining events go better than the 100.

Meanwhile I'm going to lay low today and nurse my cold. Tomorrow I have to go back to work after nine days off and it's going to be busy. I'll have to stock up on cough drops and cold medicine. Meanwhile my wife is still waiting for the call from her client so we can't really do anything today. I think it's time to sign off and go watch the Vikings and Nascar race (side by side pictures is great for that).

Later.

Legendary 100 craziness

2008-09-13T07:43:00.000-07:00

In my last blog post I wrote "I hope the Legendary 100 isn't going to be that crazy" in reference to the Richert Memorial. Wrong again!!!

Thursday night of the Legendary 100 produced some legends. Unfortunately I can't go into much detail but I'll drop a few hints. The incident involved sippin' whiskey, hooties and several gentlemen not wanting spilled spirits to go to waste. This happened in the vicinity of a certain Late Model with "evil inside" according to a decal on the valve cover. This story will probably end up being legendary.

Gotta get going so I can get out to the track. It's wet and clammy out there this morning so I hope we can dodge the bullet on the "R" stuff.

Hey ya'll, I'm still out here...Tuesday September 9...

2008-09-09T17:01:00.000-07:00

I'll bet you thought I gave up blogging. No, I didn't give it up but I have been really busy lately. Labor Day weekend I spent a night at the races and the rest of the time was taken up with family obligations. Last weekend I went to the Jerry Richert Memorial and was dealing with a roofing company and Dish Network. They had to move the dish off my roof and put it on a post out in the yard to clear some trees that had filled in over the years. I've still got a couple that we're going to have to find a way to top off without having to hire it done. I've got an olive tree my wife has been b*tching about for ten years so I'll probably get my brother-in-law over here with the chainsaw sometime after the season ends. I could use some more firewood anyways so we might as well get it done.

I took vacation this week from the JR Memorial to the Legendary 100. I'll probably commute most of the time but maybe I'll spend the night on Friday to take in some parties.

I thought I had seen everything out at the Cedar Lake campground but last Saturday night was a first. There were a couple of "yoopers" (UP of Michigan) who follow the IRA around camping near us. One of them was playing a guitar and both of them had (I'm not kidding) rubber pigeons on their shoulders. I didn't see any bird shit running down their backs so I presume they were rubber. Anyways, they're playing and singing so the guy decides to play the song "tie my kangaroo down" for Brooke Tatnell's pit guy. I didn't catch his name and he went back to Australia yesterday but I'll find out eventually. Anyways Brooke's helper and this guy with the parrot got into a bit of a pissing match trying to outdo each other imitating Arab accents. Then they'd both go back to an Aussie accent, actually the guy with the parrot sounded right on to my untrained ear. And Brooke's helper did a pretty good job at the Arab.

So watching their verbal joust I figured they were just kidding each other. Anyways, a little while later I was sitting in a lawn chair and we hear this crashing sound. Evidently from what I heard second hand Brooke's bud went and got a boom box to drown out the sound of the parrot guy's guitar. So the parrot yooper guy gets ticked off and does a Who concert impersonation smashing his guitar to smithereens. The guy goes back to drinking beer and I ask his brother what the hell happened. His brother says he was pissed at the guitar because a string broke and didn't like that one anyways so he decided to end it's service life then and there. He threw it in the fire and we watched it burn. He let me play it earlier in the day, it had a decent neck on it and played pretty good. I'd have taken it off his hands if I had known he was going to smash and burn it. I could use a second guitar, especially one that sounded that good.

So that was the first time I ever saw guys wearing rubber pigeons performing in the campground and smashing their guitar. Come to think of it I had never seen an Australian with a boom box speaking Arab before either. That's two firsts in one night. I hope the Legendary 100 isn't going to be that crazy but I have a hunch it will go beyond what we saw last Saturday night.

NAVY DAVY'S SHOT OF THE WEEK!!!

2008-09-01T13:50:00.000-07:00

".......another great weather weekend for racing. Friday night it was season championship night at Kopellah. The two best races were in the Streetstocks and the Modifieds. Chanda Fjordin Nord won the Streeters by less than a car length over Jeff Hientz and Jason Schill got his first feature win after battling Mike Mueller all race long.
Our original plan for Saturday and Sunday was to head to Hibbing for the "Labor Day Shootout" which is their final weekend of the season. We decided to stay around here though and went to Rice Lake for their final show of the year. It was a good night although a long night. I photographed this show also and was very tired by the end. There were 172 cars in the pits. The high light race of the night was the Streetstock "Little Dream Race". It's pretty neat how they get the payout. They take donations and it adds up pretty fast. Scott Clark the winner took home over 1000.00 dollars. People also donate to different positions such as we did. We put 25.00 bucks up for the 17th place finisher. Everyone comes out with something. I even heard someone put a 12 pack of beer out there for somebody.
Tonite is our final night at Kopellah.
This weeks shot comes from the Late Model feature Satuday night as they go three wide down the front stretch. See you at the races................."

Holiday weekend racing, the Richert Memorial, other ramblings...

2008-09-01T06:49:00.000-07:00

Did everyone enjoy the racing over the Labor Day weekend? The only night I had free for racing was Friday so I went to Chateau from work to watch the USMTS Modifieds. Chateau is a nice track, Musco lighting, good food, racy surface, friendly people, I really liked it. I like Mark Noble's new wrap too, it makes me thirsty just looking at it. The 40 lap Feature was outstanding, one of the best I've seen all year in any division. I'll be going back down there in the future.

I have been trying to find Mighty Axe Sprint results. Good luck on that. I checked Speed Net results as posted by North Central, they posted every division except the Sprints. That's the mentality around here that I despise, Sprints getting second class treatment as if they didn't even exist. I don't even want to get started with my thoughts on that because I'll end up putting my foot in my mouth and getting in trouble. In my mind when entry class results are posted but not the Sprints there's something major wrong with this picture. Since when are Sprint Cars second fiddle to Streets, Supers, Pures, B Mods? Or to put it another way, if the Knoxville Raceway held a Super Stock Nationals would the stands be full and the event televised on Speed. You get my point, the Wissota anti Sprint agenda strikes again. We saw it at Rice Lake last week. The ATD paper comes out and there's one brief sentence that says Bill Balog won the IRA Feature but they've got whole paragraphs describing the Modified and Midewest Modified races in lap by lap detail. Sometimes their "back gate" mentality gets to me.

Anyways, I managed to find the Friday results posted on the ASCS website. Joseph Kouba won the Friday A Main. Wow, that one caught me off guard. I don't recall Joseph ever winning a Feature then to come out and win the Axe prelim, congratulations Joseph. I hope that cheered your dad up, he was seeing red earlier this week.

Jerry Richert Jr. and Brooke Tatnell will have their cars on display at County Line Liquor, Forest Lake, Minnesota, on Thursday September 4 from 3pm to 6pm. County Line Liquor is at the first stop light as you head out of Forest Lake on the south side at the intersection of Greenway and 8. I'm going to do my best to hustle over there after my 4pm doctors appointment over in Fridley. Whenever I go to this particular doctor I end up sitting in the waiting room so I'm probably going to get to County Line about the time they're loading their cars in the haulers. I'm going to do my best to get there before they're done. Sprint Car fans, come out and show your support if you're going to be anywhere near Forest Lake.

The Jerry Richert Memorial is the biggest, most anticipated event on my entire racing schedule. I won't go into a long explanation about how that came to be but will simply point out that I know the family and there is a connection to my past.

I don't have time to type much more this morning but maybe later.

Friday, looking forward to Rice Lake IRA...

2008-08-22T17:33:00.001-07:00

I'm looking forward to the IRA race at Rice Lake tomorrow night. Last year's winner was Scotty Neitzel and it was a great night of racing.

Also on the card are the Wissota Modifieds, Wissota Midwest Modifieds and the Pure Stocks. Last year the Modified winner was Craig Thatcher but I don't believe Craig is racing much on Saturdays this season so my guess would be that Buzzy Adams will be the man to beat in the Mods.

Craig Thatcher RLS 2007

Kevin "Buzzy" Adams RLS 2007

Rice Lake had one of the better fields of Pure Stocks that I've seen in my travels. They're nowhere near as fast as the other classes but they put on a good race that's fun to watch. The IRA along with these support classes should make it an entertaining night. Rice Lake has been struggling with car counts this season from what I have seen on the results pages. I am not hung up on the sanctioning politics and don't like to see anyone struggle regardless of their affiliation.

RLS Pures 2007

There are some rumors going around the internet boards that the Rice Lake Speedway was sold. I can't verify that and have no idea what goes on behind closed doors so I'll just let those details work themselves out and leave it at that. RLS is an infrequent destination for me anyways as I have only attended a few Late Model and Sprint specials up there. Actually, I did make one attempt to go to Rice Lake sometime around the summer of 1966. There was a Supermodified special and I rode up there with my uncle Lloyd following the race car trailer. My uncle used to help our cousin out with the car so I tagged along with them. Unfortunately, that was before the days of cell phones and when we got there a heavy shower had dumped on the track resulting in the race being canceled. I specifically remember there being little or no grandstands and the track being the tiniest little thing I had ever seen up til then, a small quarter mile.

I did not return to Rice Lake until I started writing for MRC in 1999 and wanted to get out and visit a bunch more new tracks. I'm not on a mission to rack up record numbers of tracks on my racing resume but I have been to quite a few. Let me see if I can name some of them:

Minnesota
State Fair (dirt & asphalt)
Twin City (later North Starr)
Stillwater
Hutchinson
Fairmont
Jackson
Deer Creek
Kasson
Owatonna
Princeton
Grove Creek
Golden Spike
Alexandria
Proctor
North Central
Elko
Raceway (17)

Wisconsin
Cedar Lake
Kopellah
Rice Lake
Superior
ABC
Fox Ridge
Red Cedar
Central Wisconsin (formerly Monster Hall)
Angell Park
La Crosse (10)

Iowa
Knoxville
Cresco
Farley (3)

Ohio
Eldora (1)

Kansas
Kansas Speedway
Lakeside (2)

Texas
CC Speedway Corpus Christi (1)

South Dakota
Aberdeen
Husets (2)

That's 36 total but I can't help feeling as if I might have missed one. This year I added La Crosse to the list and I'm thinking about going to Chateau for the USMTS the Friday of Labor Day weekend (that's next Friday already). It's 122 miles from Forest Lake and work is 25 miles so I'd have a 97 mile drive, mostly freeway after work. Without taking any vacation I'd be leaving the office around 3:30 and should be able to get down there by around 5:30 or 6pm. That would give me enough time to sign in and walk around the pits for a while before the races started. I'm going to have to give that some serious thought because it's not that far and I have never been there before. I have seen photos and video clips and it looks like it would be a fun place to take photos of the USMTS. So far this season I haven't seen the USMTS and it's coming up on the end of the year already. I could add a new track and catch the USMTS in one shot. Might be a plan, we'll have to count the pennies.

I don't know about you but I'm about broke after a season of racing. Not the kind of broke where I'm destitute and can't afford to go to another race but the kind of broke where I'm having to pay attention to the bottom line more than I was a couple months ago. I'm just going to bite the bullet and spend the money. There's plenty of time over the winter to live like a monk and not do anything so I can save money. The rest of the season is going to cost more than I want to think about but I want to do some traveling to close out the year and I'll be damned if I'm going to let anything stop me. Photo sales usually pick up after the season for a couple months leading up to the holidays so I'll be able to bank a few bucks after the season to hopefully replace what I spend.

I've got a personal savings account that I use to fund all my racing. I have a certain amount taken out each month and lately I've been drawing more than I've put in. That might not sound like such a terrible thing but my property taxes, homeowners insurance and car payments come out of that account too. I've got another tax installment due in October and have not made a car payment in several years so I'm getting by with tired old iron. One of these days it's going to catch up with me and I'm going to have to start taking a car payment out of there again. Also, I use that fund for emergencies like breakdowns, etc. I've got credit but I don't like to use the plastic unless it's absolutely necessary so I've been dipping into that a little more than I'm comfortable with lately as well.

I was raised by my depression era grandparents after my folks died and I was in my formative teen years so being frugal was pounded into my head. Another thing they did was to insist that I work during the summer instead of just hanging around getting in trouble. I got my first job at 14 on a truck farm, worked 8 hours five and a half days a week. The first year the farmer paid me $3.50 per day and the second year I got a raise to $5 a day. I was one of the bigger kids so he used to take me out to do road maintenance because he had the contract for our village. Talk about violating child labor laws LOL, today they'd have hung anyone they caught doing that to kids. He contracted to do driveways too so he'd bring me along on those jobs as well. Hot sun, 95 degrees and humid I'd be out there raking asphalt and pulling the roller (water filled pushed, pulled by hand). At 16 I went to work on the golf course cutting fairways, roughs and greens with various size mowers up to and including a tractor with a gang mower. A few weeks prior to my 18th birthday I reported to basic training, got married a couple years later and have been working ever since. I guess the "abuse" according to modern libs that I received working on a truck farm at 14 gave me what they'd consider a bad habit in their eyes. I developed a good work ethic. Those lessons I learned at 14 were passed onto my children and hopefully will help my grandkids in some small way in their lives as well.

So where were we before I got sidetracked and told half my life story. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention the Rice Lake Midwest Modifieds.

Midwest Modified action, Rice Lake 2007

Rice Lake offers some good photo opportunities and I'm looking forward to shooting there again. There was enough daylight last year to catch hot laps and most of the IRA time trials head on using available light. Rice Lake has some good angles for the type of head on shots I like to do where you can see the driver's eyes. This is my favorite angle for Sprint Car photos and I love shooting without a flash whenever I can get away with it. Perhaps I'll do that or maybe I'll try the straight on angle from the infield I did down at Arlington and Jackson. I'll see how the light is and make a decision when I get there.

head on using available light from outside of track

head on angle from inside of the track at Arlington

Robby Wolfgang shot from head on angle at Jackson

Well, this is going to have to do it for tonight. I'm about typed out for now...

Wednesday August 20, podcasts, IRA at RLS and more...

2008-08-20T17:10:00.000-07:00

Was anybody out there listening to the Dirt Nation podcast? They went offline a while ago stating that they took their broadcasts offline in order to switch to a podcast only format and have not come back up yet. There is a post on the site stating that they ran into a delay because of an update to their podcast software. Now I'm not claiming to be an authority but some of you might recall my experiment creating a local racing podcast. Actually, it wasn't so much a racing podcast as a personal racing audio blog. After having played music for 40 years and having learned 4 track recording the recording and sound balancing part came easy for me. I did the entire podcast and mixing using a free open source audio recording program called Audacity. I listen to a lot of podcasts on a daily basis on my MP3 player, some are among the most popular on sites such as Podcast Alley, and many of the most popular podcasts are created using Audacity. They get way more listeners than any dirt track podcast will ever get. So I don't know what they're talking about that there's a delay due to their program being updated. All one needs is the free open source program Audacity, a mic, some podsafe music from one of the royalty free music sites, a few spare hours and presto, you've got a podcast. There are even free open source RSS feed generators out there for the taking. Actually I got pretty good at mixing the sound (attributable to past music recording and sound board experience) and my podcast stacked up pretty well as far as sound quality.

Another podcast I have been listening to on occasion is the KFAN Motorsports show. I'm not particularly fond of that one (no offense to Chris Hawkey) but it's too commercialized and NASCARized for my taste. Obviously it has to be commercialized because it's a re-broadcast of an AM radio show so they have to advertise and follow the standard radio format. Part of following the standard corporate radio format is music clips that target a young audience and emphasizing the personalities of the hosts often times it seems even more than the racing. I understand the need to do that, they have to attract younger listeners and target the biggest audience possible which in racing means television NASCAR fans.

Many of you might remember that the former host was Russ Bohaty and that Chris came in as a co-host and ended up taking over the gig. Russ is a good guy, really sincere and he loves his racing, but I think maybe his love for grass roots racing over the bigger picture (NASCAR) might have had something to do with the change. I talked to Russ as recently as last Friday night and I know Chris a little but I have never discussed this with either of them. I could be all wrong so consider this my opinions, my observations, which may not be entirely accurate as far as what really happened. All I know is that I liked Russ' more locally oriented coverage better because it had less NASCAR and not as much trendy music. Just my opinion so take it however you will but when I listen to a podcast or radio show I don't want to hear banter between hosts or endless music and commercials. True podcasts, those done in somebody's home office with a PC and mic, are often much more to the point and that's what I prefer.

You're probably thinking "if you think you can do better why don't you go ahead and do it?" Like I said, I could put out a good broadcast from a sound standpoint and set it up with RSS so your podcatcher could locate new episodes. I know how to do that and have done it. I could make the phone calls, line up the interviews and cull news to report on the podcast if I wanted. I think I've got enough contacts and friends in the racing business that I could get that done. I've got a digital voice recorder that I could use to get interviews at the track and have tested it so I know how to upload them to the computer and incorporate them into a podcast. There are programs such as Skype that are used to make the long distance calls and record the conversation directly onto a computer so with a little practice I could do that.

The reason I didn't take my podcast any further is that I already have a full plate of things to do at the races. There is also a line that I drew in the sand a few years ago after we did a year of television interviews. I swore that I would never work that hard at the races again for free. Without advertising or some kind of compensation it just wouldn't be worth it to do all that work at the track. My photography is basically a hobby but I do sell a few photos from time to time so I get some hotdog and gas money out of it. If I did a podcast and chased interviews it would be too much like a job and even though the fans would enjoy it I'd just be obligating myself to do even more work. That's why I stopped posting news and results and went to news feed links on the gotomn.com website. There are text links for tracks and sanctions as well as Speednet and Hoseheads Newsfeeds right on the main page. In addition to that there is a links page. That's all you need to find what you're looking for. I don't have to post endless results on my main page where you have to scroll through 200 banner ads to find out who won. I've got most of the favorite local tracks (to my location just north of the Twin Cities) and links to the most popular message boards on my site. If you can't find what you're looking for from those sources there's probably not much more I can do to help you. Besides, my site does have some news but it's never going to be everything to everybody. No website is that good.

Another thing that bugs the hell out of me is dirt track racing sites that require registering a user name and password to view content. Now I understand why people need to register to use message boards and that sort of thing but no way anybody should have to register to simply enter the site. Heck, I can see photos, video, and all kinds of stuff on places like YouTube and major news and sports websites. Who do these dirt track site webmasters think they are that their content is so valuable users should have to establish a user and password. As a webmaster I know what the reason is, sponsor statistics, demographics, market share, all that commercial sh*t. Now I realize that there's a time and place for corporate mumbo jumbo but when I come home from a day of that stuff at the office I don't want to deal with it when I surf my favorite dirt track sites. I think with the worsening economy and tighter advertising dollars some of these self serving money hungry folks that thought they could get a piece of the dirt track racing pie are going to find out that it's not the cash cow they imagined. There are a few, and I won't say any names, that have come along during the last five or so years and were gonna' whip the dirt track world. One even suggested that I shut my site down and go to work for them "and do it the way it should be done." Some no longer have a presence on the internet, they came in like a flash in the pan and ran off with advertiser's money. Their sites are gone and mine (the one that wasn't doing it right) is still out there.

So if anybody comes on the message boards and says they're the next new dirt track site that's gonna' whip the world give it the test of time. If it's still there in a year then just maybe there's something to it. I think most racing fans can see that type of deal as clearly as if the webmaster had a sign on their forehead that says "I'm only in it for the money."

Yeah, I know what some of you are thinking. I used to run a few banner ads but those businesses approached me and offered to help me with my website expenses. I never solicited any advertising and when some of them started making demands I said to hell with it and discontinued the banners. I'm appreciative of all the help I got and I got to know a few business owners through the banners that I still see sometimes but it just wasn't something I wanted to continue. Other things I tried years ago was selling photo CD's and gotomn decals but I probably caused more hard feelings by doing those things than it was worth. I never made much doing it and all I was ever wanting to do was supplement my gas and hotdog expenses. Now that I have put more emphasis on the photography (and hopefully gotten pretty good at it) that's how I make a buck or two but even that isn't much. Mostly I do what everyone else does, hold my expenses down wherever possible and spend every spare penny I can muster to go racing.

And now that I'm not hung up on the financial end of it I'm having a lot more fun with the racing. I learned a lot of lessons over the past ten years. I alienated some people and made some bad decisions but now my website and my racing are coming out of pocket and I do as much or as little as I can. I'm happy and my only regrets are that I might have pissed someone off in the past and that this season is winding down too fast. One thing my experience and mistakes taught me is to be suspicious of any new internet jockey that comes out of college thinking they're going to set the racing world on fire. When I taught myself how to create a website in 1996 I was already 45 years old and building computers and learning graphics and simple web design was just for fun. I didn't have any formal training and now I'm going to be 57 in a few weeks so I don't know for sure how much longer I'll stick with it. I always told people I don't want to be hunched over a computer doing this at 60 year old but that's only three years away so now I say 70 because I'm not ready to quit yet. I'd be willing to bet that gotomn gets more hits per month than some of the supposed commercial sites because it's been around for over ten years. I just don't blow my horn as loud as some people so nobody knows I'm out here half the time. I want to give something back to racing and not take away from it so I'll continue to have fun with this as long as possible.

This Saturday I'm planning on attending the IRA race at Rice Lake. I enjoyed the show last year so it should be a fun night. Rice Lake is a high banked speed bowl and the racing there is very exciting. Hopefully Red Cedar canceling won't affect the car count too much as some teams might not travel for only one night of racing. IRA usually schedules two nights when they travel in order to make it worthwhile for the teams but RCS pulled the plug without telling anyone.

That's going to do it for tonight, gotta get some rest before another exciting day at the office...

NAVY DAVY'S SHOT OF THE WEEK!!!

2008-08-17T15:03:00.000-07:00

".........another weekend of great weather and excellent racing. I was at Kopellah Friday night and Cedar Lake Saturday. Both shows were very good. Tons of side by side and three wide racing as the regular season nears it's end. With all the rainouts we had early this year I wonder where all the time went. Here we are on the door step of another specials season then it's all over for another year. Sometimes it seems as though this season never really got going. I'm about 15 shows behind my regular pace.
This weeks shot comes from the Modified feature at Kopellah Friday night. See you at the races............."

Wednesday August 13, just thinking out loud...

2008-08-13T18:11:00.000-07:00

Jeff Shepard, Superior Speedway Gumout race. Get well soon.
Stan Meissner photo

First off I hope that my comments about having to take some time next season to get some projects done didn't cause too much of a stir. I got a decent bid on my roofing job so I'll have a little left over for the other repairs. Looking at the cars I'll have to see which one is worth keeping for a couple more years and I'll have my brother-in-law evaluate that. I know the people that own Sparkle Auto Sales so I'll probably buy used and work with them to find what I'm looking for. We've dealt with these challenges in the past and they're not insurmountable obstacles to attending races but some years I have had to adjust my schedule. I'm sure you have all had to do that from time to time. I'm a glass half full guy by nature and tend to panic thinking about how difficult something is going to be but once I dive into the task things work out fine. What's that called, fear of the unknown?

Actually I got a lot of experience remodeling when I owned a home in the Cities. Let's see, rewired, new duct work and furnace, plumbing, sheet rock, hanging windows, privacy fence, chain link fence, finishing the entire inside of an addition. You name it and I've probably done it at one time or another. I've got ladders and most of the tools I'll ever need. But I don't do that stuff for a living so I have to ask questions and research it so I know what I'm doing. I do about as close to a professional job of finishing drywall as the typical do-it-yourselfer is going to get. And if the project takes a professional a half day it might take me two or three days but my work has gotten the approval of the building inspector. The older I get the slower and more deliberate I get at these big projects.

I've got the week of the Cedar Lake 100 off this September so if I make some of the projects my priority instead of photo editing I can get a head start. The thing to try and do is try to maximize my time this fall, winter and next spring. I'm sure we'll be alright but we might have to juggle the schedule for a while to get it all done.

I'm not such a hard core racer that I have to go to a set number of races and I have been doing it for a long time. Since 1962 to be exact.

Did I mention that we camped at Cedar Lake last Saturday? I'm finding that I can't hang in there as long as I used to a few years ago. This summer I have only hung in there until around 3am before I have to turn in for the night. Maybe I'll score my best finish of the season at the Richert Memorial. If I have to drive until 4am that's a different deal, I get into the drive so much that I have trouble falling asleep when I do get home. Difference is that when I'm driving I'm drinking energy drinks and laying off the beer for weekend. There's a big difference between the effects of Rooster Booster and Miller Lite. I'm a firm believer in staying planted in one place when you're enjoying a few beers. I always make sure that I stay for the night at the party, camp or have a designated driver. Years ago we weren't as careful but back when I first started driving in the 60's they'd sometimes even let you go and follow you to make sure you made it home. Times have changed and in this case for the better because we probably wouldn't have change if there wasn't an incentive. Then when one gets older it all starts to make sense and we mellow out.

There I go getting off in left field again.

Tuesday August 12 still trying to catch up

2008-08-12T17:26:00.000-07:00

I can't believe that it's already Tuesday the 12th and the last time I posted was almost an entire week ago on the 6th. Time sure has been flying by lately and I have been spending some time away from the computer.

We camped out at Cedar Lake last Saturday night and had a good time even though it was a just a small group. Nothing like the USA Nationals crowd, there were only a few campers and your typical week after the Nationals smaller crowd. I have noticed that even some of the owners and track workers take the week after the Nats off every year so it must be a grueling week for everyone.

The Late Model Feature got to be kind of an ordeal this time around. The track slicked over, there were still a couple of grooves of racing but cars were spinning out almost every lap. They finally shortened the race to 25 laps and awarded the win to John Kaanta. I commented to Ron Bernhagen how frustrating it must be to work just as hard on the track for every race but they're still at the mercy of humidity, wind an weather. They put in just as much work whether the track turns out perfect or not so perfect. Man, that has to be a lot like farming, you work your *ss off based on an educated guess but never know how things are going to turn out. I appreciate what those track prep guys do and share their frustration when it doesn't go the way they'd like to see it. Maybe that was the dirt gods way of evening things out after three perfect nights the week before. The racing was actually pretty good right up to the end of the night but it was nothing like the previous weekend but that was an impossible act to follow.

This week I'll be heading to Jackson for the Friday of the Nationals. I'm looking forward to the show. My hands are wiped out after keying all day at the office so should really give them a rest but I had a few things to say. I'll try to get on here a little more during the coming weeks.

I haven't been real enthused about the racing since the USA Nationals were over. It was so good that I'm spoiled and anything else is going to be a letdown for a while. That's the problem with a great weekend of racing, it takes a while before things measure up.

Man, I'm in a jam for next season. You see, I make a pretty good living but my wife only works a little part time and she spends a lot, a lot, I said a lot of money on frivolous things. Gifts for the grandkids, furniture, decorating, who needs all that frilly stuff. Heck, I'd line the walls with my racing pictures if it was up to me but she doesn't like them. Anyways, in case you haven't figured it out I'm saying this tongue in cheek. I need a woman who knows how to decorate and to remind me to do things for the family because I'm so one dimensional I'd never think of it on my own.

Next year things could change though. You see, we moved into this house in 1997 and really got into the website around that same time. In 1999 I started writing for the racing papers and gradually got more involved in the photography since then, especially the past five years. I was having so much fun that I neglected the house and it's getting run down and needs a lot of work. We're talking about getting into a town home if the market comes back to where we can sell this place but first I'm going to have to do the work. I'm not talking a couple hours at night, h*ll that's how long it takes just to cut the grass. No, I'm talking all summer long, a couple weeks of vacation, intense stuff like replacing windows, concrete work and a bunch of big projects. I'm talking all my vacation, nights and weekends all summer long. My wife has been kind enough to let me "check out" every summer for ten years and now she's asking for something back. We're getting closer to retirement and I'm not getting any younger so I'm dreading it but it looks like the summer of 2009 will be the year I do the work.

I'd still get to a few of the big events but probably could only do about ten nights of racing for the entire season. It has taken me ten years to build up all my media contacts and get to the point I'm at today. Racing doesn't wait for anybody, if I step aside for a season there will be somebody filling my spot and I might not get it back. That's my biggest regret but I've got to take care of family and home first, racing is just a hobby.

In addition to the house I'm due for another vehicle before long. Actually it wouldn't hurt to replace both vehicles but I can't afford more than one car payment at a time. I haven't had a car payment for several years so I've been putting the extra money into other things like racing. Well, now it's catching up with me and I'm going to have to make some sacrifices. I'm not trying to get anybody's sympathy, just thinking out loud about how I'm going to tackle these obstacles that will be coming up during the next year or so. It's the wise thing to do to take care of the necessary things and I know deep down inside that's what I'm going to have to do. I'll have to take a real close look at everything during the winter and figure out what I'm going to do.

One more thing that I'm getting more and more is that the wife is sick of me using all my vacation to go racing and not taking her anywhere. I operate on a shoestring like I already mentioned so I'm not talking about going to exotic places. She likes car trips within a couple hundred miles that are not tied in with a race. I think that's pretty reasonable of her and can totally understand how she feels. I've got a cousin who used to own Sprint Cars then in 1976 they sold out and never looked back. He used to chase up and down the highway every weekend. Fairmont, Knoxville, Sioux Falls all summer for years just like us race chasers do today. Then one day he walked away and never looked back. I don't think I could do that, I love the photography too much, but I would be comfortable cutting back some. Have you ever noticed that many of the racing photographers and writers are single? Unless they grew up in a racing family not many women will tolerate a guy being gone all summer. At ten years I'd say my wife has been pretty tolerant but now that travel is so expensive I can see her point. Just like a lot of you I'm spread pretty thin but I can't see myself quitting entirely. Racing media work is like a treadmill, you can't get off and take a hiatus because your gig won't be there when you get back. The show must go on so if you get off you're out of luck. That's where I'm having a problem, I need to take the time off but I want the racing gig to still be there when I come back. The thought of not doing this anymore is depressing.

Wednesday August 6, blog statistics...

2008-08-06T17:49:00.001-07:00

The USA Nationals and a few other things have kept me away from the blog for a few too many days. The blog hits picked up quite a bit when I was posting every day. The best month was July when it got 1397 visits. The gotomn.com website gets a lot more than the blog at around 15,000 to 20,000 unique visitors per month during the season. Unique means the number of new persons that visited the website at least once during the month, the website monthly hits are higher.

I wore myself out at the USA Nationals and had to spent a few days recouping. Actually it's been a working recouping and it has been sort of a challenging week at work. Not that I had more than the usual amount waiting for me but I've had some tough files dumped on my desk that I had to get a second opinion on. We know what the price needs to be but we're trying to figure out how to make adjustments on two separate files. They're currently sitting on a supervisor's desk and even he is having a tough time getting an answer on how to work through some of the system edits. That's right, finding the price is relatively easy compared to some of the hoops we have to jump through when something out of the ordinary comes up. It's a complex system with thousands of interconnected users. Sometimes you don't see that kind of stuff for six months but I had it waiting for me this week. Tomorrow I have to stand in for someone who will be on vacation so that's an additional task this week. Sometimes that happens but you just buckle down and work through it. Last week it was my turn to relax, this week it's somebody else's.

Tonight I was going to cut the grass but it rained here north of the cities so it was too wet. It's not that bad anyways, this time of the year the lawn growth slows down so a person can get away with going over a week between cuts. I'll find a couple hours sometime during the next few days. Probably on Friday night the way it's looking. I wonder if I could drive to work and sneak out early to get a head start on it. I'll have to think about that because an hour head start never hurts on a Friday. I've got grandkids coming over Thursday that I need to visit with so everything is going to converge all at once on Friday and Saturday.

I'm going to back off for a few weeks and only take in one night of racing per week through the Richert Memorial. The following week I'm planning on going to the 100 for most if not all of the four nights. I've got some work pending around the house that I really need to devote some of my vacation time to. I get pretty busy on the computer tending to photos when I shoot three or four nights in a row and am getting to the track mid afternoon. Probably with the 100 I could leave a little later than usual and maybe spend a night or two out there. I'm sure the campground isn't full yet so I've got time to plan this out. Thing is that week off is going to be my last serious opportunity of the summer because I don't get much done during the week. Usually after the last printed issue of MRC I can back off a little because the online version is monthly and everybody has seen photos from every possible angle of every car that races within 500 miles so I'm not in a big rush to get them posted the very next day. By that time of the season I can swap CF cards and not take as many shots. Who knows, maybe I'll even watch a Feature from the stands. I'm thinking about doing that one of these days because I haven't watched a Feature from the stands all season. I do watch some Heats and some of the semi Features from the pit side stands at Cedar Lake sometimes if I have to take a break.

Anyways, I'm rambling too much tonight. I'll try to get in the habit post more often again now that we've got the big weekend out of the way.

NAVY DAVY'S SHOTS OF THE WEEK!!!

2008-08-06T17:39:00.000-07:00

".........it all started Wednesday night at The Superior Speedway for a WDRL show. It was a hot and humid night. I was waiting for that big air conditioner just to the north to kick in but it never did. The track was great and the racing was pretty darn good too. Jimmy Mars was the class of the field that night making his win in the 50 lap feature look easy.
Thursday found us back at Cedar Lake Speedway for night one of the 21st Annual USA Nationals. With another beautiful night WDRL was on hand for another great 50 lap feature. On hand also were the Nascar Superstocks. Mike Weber won the feature. The 50 lap WDRL feature went to John Kaanta who held off Jimmy Mars after a lap 41 caution.
Friday night we were once again at Cedar Lake for night two of the USA Nationals. With 50 cars taking qualifying, a full show of Nascar Late Models, six USA National heat races and a pole dash the night was topped off with another 50 lap WDRL feature which was a make up from the Masters back in June the fans got more than their monies worth. It just doesn't get any better for us Late Model nuts. The track held up well and the racing was as good as it gets. In the Nascar feature Pat Doar and Rick Hanestead ran side by side for 20 plus laps before they got into lapped traffic at which time Hanestead pulled away for the win. A very excited Brady Smith entered victory lane after the 50 lap WDRL feature. It was a great night.
Saturday was third and final night of racing at Cedar Lake. What another great night it was. On tap this night was another full show of Nascar Late Models, two 20 lap B-Mains for the last chance to get into the 100 lap USA Nationals and of course the 100 lap feature. After Friday night I thought maybe Saturday would be a yawner. Boy was I wrong. The final night of the 21st Annual USA Nationals was as good as it gets. In the Nascar 30 lap feature Kerry Hanson in the 4 car took off in the lead and stayed there for ten or so laps. Brent Larson and Lance Mathees were making their way through the field. Larson grabbed the top spot as Hanson fades back. Right there with Larson was Mathees and these two fought back and forth for the remainder with Larson getting the win less than a car length in front of Mathees. After some track prep the 100 lap feature was next. With the lights turned off and spot lights and smoke the feature cars entered the track one by one. This was another great race. There were several leaders at different points throughout. Early in the race there was one scary moment when Eric Pember lost a tire in turn four and rolled his car. Fortunately he wasn't hurt. Can't say the same for his car though. After 99 laps it came down to Scott Bloomquist, Shannon Babb, and Brian Birkhofer. Birkhofer had a flat tire earlier in the race and had to start at the rear and worked his way back to third. It was nearly a three wide finish to another great night. Bloomquist was the winner.
After attending all 21 USA National events this I think was the best yet. As I said all weekend "it just don't get no better than this".
Each of this weeks shots comes from all four great nights. See you at the races.................."

Saturday August 2, final night of the USA Nationals

2008-08-02T11:08:00.001-07:00

Here are a few Friday night photos:

Justin Fegers comin' atcha!

The "Intimigator"

The WDRL make up Feature salutes the crowd

Brady Smith (2) battles Ashley Anderson (81) for the lead

Brady Smith celebrates in Victory Lane

It's been a busy weekend and tonight is the big Feature event. I'm enjoying the show and it should be a good one tonight. Last night Bloomquist uncharacteristically hit the wall during his first timed lap forcing him to start from the back of his Heat. Bloomer worked his way up to second putting him in the show. It should be interesting to see him work his way up from the back.

I'll be posting more when I get a chance. Just wanted to let everyone know I haven't forgot about the blog.

Tuesday and it's gonna' be a warm one at the USA Nationals...

2008-07-29T16:12:00.001-07:00

Forgive me for I have screwed up. How's that? Well, I forgot to reserve a campsite for the USA Nationals this year. I got a few offers for some extra space but now that I see the forecast calls for hot weather I'm thinking that it might be kind of tough staying in the tent trailer for three days. I don't have A/C in my truck so I wouldn't get a break from the heat for three straight days and nights. Not that a little warm weather would hurt me but I prefer to limit my camping to two nights. I'm thinking about pulling the camper out there the following Saturday for a regular night of racing. That would be more laid back and if it's hot it will only be for one night.

So I'm gearin' up for the USA Nationals without the luxury of a campsite. I've got a writing deadline on Sunday so it's probably not a good idea to be up all Saturday night and then try to process photos and write a column. There are certain big weekends in my annual racing schedule that deserve special attention and the USA Nationals is one of the biggest. If somebody offers me a place in their camper to crash I might stay out there Friday night. We'll see what happens on Friday but Saturday is out of the question. I've got Thursday and Friday off work so I'll figure something out. It's a win win deal, if I find a place to spend the night on Friday I win and if I drive home I'll have a chance to work on my photos. Either way is fine with me, I don't mind sleeping in my own air conditioned bedroom.

Who do you think will win the USA Nationals? I'd have to go with Scott Bloomquist, Jimmy Mars or Brady Smith. Those are the three that I think have the best chance of winning this weekend. I haven't paid much attention to who's coming up here and there are a lot of Late Model drivers I'm not familiar with. I'll have to defer to a statistician like GRP to verify how many different Late Model drivers I've seen at Cedar Lake during the past decade but I'm sure there are a lot of them. I never paid much attention to the Late Models before I started writing for MRC. I'd bring the kids out to CLS to watch them sometimes but mostly we went to Sprint shows. When I got into the website, writing and photography I came to appreciate them a lot more. Now I start having withdrawal pains if I go more than a week without seeing the Late Models. It's funny how things come around isn't it. Am I mellowing with age or just a closet four wide fanatic?

Mostly I like watching the guys I see week in and week out so I'm happy to see they've got a full program of the Nascar Late Models. I've gotten to know a lot of those guys during the past ten years so that makes it even more enjoyable. Weekly shows at Cedar Lake are a lot of fun so I try to get to as many as possible each season. It's a great bunch of people and sometimes I even regret occasionally heading to other destinations for special events. But I have to remind myself that variety is the spice of life and that I cut my racing teeth in the grandstand of a big ol' half mile and enjoy the quarter mile bullrings. This year included asphalt Midgets at La Crosse so I got a taste of some different types of racing. We even saw indoor Midgets and that's going to be something that's going to get bigger every year.

Les and I went to the Arlington Raceway last Saturday night for the IRA Sprint special. Here are a few samples of some of my photos.

Arlington is a tough place to shoot. They've got a darker color of dirt than I'm used to up here north of the Cities and east into western Wisconsin. It's not as black as the surface down in Jackson, Husets or Knoxville but it's darker than places like Cedar Lake or Princeton. Every track has different lighting and angles, taking racing photos is a moving target, that's for sure. I was please with the results from Arlington but a little disappointed with my percentage of "keepers".

This week I'll be back on familiar turf at the USA Nationals. It's going to be more crowded than usual so that makes it a little tougher getting around the grounds and getting in position to take a photo. Not only for the outside the track stuff in the grandstand and tiered parking but there are usually a lot of visiting photographers as well. Not only do you find people standing where you usually do every other weekend but somebody done planted their *ss in your folding chair while you were taking pictures. There's just more people to deal with, great for the track but it's more of a challenge for the photographer. We adapt. I've got some ideas that I'm anxious to try out. Watch my photo gallery for the results.

NAVY DAVY'S SHOT OF THE WEEK!!!‏

2008-07-27T11:03:00.001-07:00

"...............after getting rained out for the 8th time this season at Kopellah we beat feet for The Red Cedar Speedway Friday night. The Modifieds put on one of the best shows I've seen in awhile. All through the heats and the feature they were side by side and three wide. After all the heats were finished I realized they didn't have a photographer on hand so I went out to the truck got my camera and did the features. The Modified feature was great. There was Dave Cain and Craig Thatcher, two of the best runners around doing battle with Jake Hartung. Wouldn't you know it-Jake got the win.
Saturday it was back to Cedar Lake on a warm clear night. Another good night of racing. Congrats to Cory Davis(superstock winner), Craig "The Wild Child" Brightbill(A Mod winner) and Jeremy Houle a rookie in the Midwest Mods for his first win. All are first time winners at CLS in '08.
This weeks shot comes from Red Cedar. Craig Thatcher, Dave Cain, and Jake Hartung battling in the A-Mod feature. See you at the races..........."

Wednesday 7/23 thoughts...

2008-07-23T16:11:00.001-07:00

We missed a Saturday night of racing last weekend due to rain and I'm feeling out of it. I'll probably get the passion back this weekend when I go to the IRA at Arlington. Arlington will kick off a busy week with the USA Nationals next Thursday through Saturday nights. I'm still not 100% sure whether I'm going to spend the entire weekend out there in the camper, drive back and forth or some combination of the two. My writing deadline is a week from Sunday and it's brutal just trying to stay awake the Sunday after an all nighter let alone write and edit photos. Maybe somebody will twist my arm but I'm kind of leaning towards driving back and forth so I can get some things done around the house and keep up with the writing obligations. I've got a contractor lined up to do my roof and it's beginning to look like the job might fall right in the middle of the USA Nationals. The wife is going to want me at home so I can handle the details with the contractors. It looks like it could end up being a busy two days of vacation more than a relaxing one.

Anytime I've got consecutive nights of racing like that the routine goes something like this. Get up, cut the grass, get online and check email etc., while I charge camera and flash batteries. Get out to the track early so I can get a parking place reasonably close to the back gate. Walk around and stake things out, plan my photo strategy for the night, talk to a few people and say hello to those I don't see very often. Have the camera setup by the time hotlaps start and shoot all night until the conclusion of racing. Make my way to the truck (back and feet are usually aching by this time) and drive home. Fire up the computer, grab a glass of water or sometimes a beer if I've got any, upload my photos and start sorting through them. Check email, make some notes for my column before I forget what happened. I'm usually wound up so I've got to watch a little television then get to bed by 3am. The next morning get up and work on the previous night's photos, charge flash batteries, check the truck, say howdy to the wife and head back out to the track. Same routine at the track and at home for three days and nights.

You can probably see why it's so tough for me spending the weekend at the track when I've got deadlines. When I do that I'm three days behind by the time I get home on Sunday and I've still got a column to write. Sunday I send photos, write my column, send the column, send any additional last minute photo requests, and get as many of the Saturday photos processed as I've got time for. Do a few loads of laundry, make sure I turn the alarm clock on and put the trash and recycling out on the road. So it's not just a matter of sitting around relaxing and drinking beer by my camper for three days and nights. As a matter of fact, sitting around drinking beer can be more of distraction because I'm sitting there thinking about everything I have to do when I get back home. Long race weekends are a lot of work, I'm usually on my feet for five or six hours at the track, so it wears me out. That's why I would prefer not to camp on the weekends that I've got a writing deadline. Some years it falls that way. I didn't reserve a campsite but I've had a couple offers so I might relent and take them up on it. It would be grueling to stay out there but there's something to be said for the parties. If I wasn't doing the photography and writing there's no question about what I'd do. I'm probably going to go right down to the wire before I decide.

Speaking of photos and graphics I hope some of the people that have inquired about me doing graphics for them understand my situation. I'm not going to be the most responsive at getting it done because I've got a day job that keeps me away from home from 6am until 5pm every day. The photos and graphics are just a side deal that I squeeze in on nights and weekends when possible. As you have already seen, next weekend during the USA Nationals I'll have little time for working on photos and no time for graphics. Oh, if I got a special shot that someone needed an 8x10 of I could get it developed in one hour (at a higher cost per photo) and bring it with me the next night. Usually I try to put the photos on the back burner during those long racing weekends. I think me being kind of slow might have irritated some people that have been after me to do some artwork but I have to remind them. Those guys getting their artwork to you the next day have all day to work on it and they own $5,000 roll stock printers. I send all my stuff out and have to do it on nights and weekends when I get a spare moment. Kids and grandkids drop by, things break down around the house, sometimes I just need a break. Are other guys faster than me? Yes. Will I eventually get your order done? Yes.

It helps, especially with the artwork, if people can give me an idea what they want so I don't spin my wheels designing something they don't like. Those guys that do graphics for a living will come up with one design for the big events. Every graphics event border design is the same except it's got a different car in it. When I do them I sit down with a blank piece of paper (actually a blank computer screen) and start from scratch. With my method you're going to get a one-of-a-kind design but it's going to take me an hour or two, sometimes more. Seeing as processing is about $4.95 and I'm spending 2 hours on the design there's $20 profit so I'm making $10 per hour or less. Usually when a person starts a side business they want to make more per hour than they do at their day job, not one third or less. So I'm not doing it to make a huge amount of money but it's something I can do in my shorts while drinking a beer instead of vegetating in front of the television. I figure if I'm going to sit here I might as well make a little something.

So I do appreciate the orders and I'm sorry that I can't be as fast as those folks that do this for a living. The way I figure is this is the only way I can make a few bucks to supplement my travels. Next year who knows, I'm due to buy a car and that means the payments will cut my racing budget down to just about nothing. I don't even want to think about it right now... We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. In the meantime I'll have fun this season.

Monday evening July 21 and I'm finally getting caught up after my vacation week...

2008-07-21T18:03:00.000-07:00

I went to five races in nine days during my vacation week with Cedar Lake's NASCAR night the following Wednesday. All the photos to process in such a short period of time as well as traveling to and from races made the following couple of weeks a scramble to keep up with it. Now that things have finally settled down I'll be able to get back on my normal schedule of one race per weekend and occasionally two. This weekend will be the IRA at Arlington and the following weekend is the USA Nationals.

That means I'll be driving a little further than usual and visiting a somewhat unfamiliar track this Saturday. Not that I haven't been to Arlington plenty of times over the years but I have never quite gotten the hang of my camera settings there. The white balance has been tricky there but I have taken steps that have enabled me to dial it in more precisely in a shorter period of time. In racing photography everything happens so fast, snap, snap, snap, oh sh*t...delete... Once the green flag drops you won't have much time to react so you'd better have your settings dialed in before the race starts. Not unlike racing now that I think about it.

Anyways I'm confident that I'll do fine there this time. Not every track is the same and Arlington has it's share of unique characteristics that you won't find anywhere else. You just have to go in there organized and an idea of what you want taking into consideration the time of day and what the light is going to do, the likelihood of intermittent cloud cover and what type of lighting the track has. The various kinds of lighting you fight as the evening progresses are, setting sunlight that changes color temperature, shadows, track lighting and flash. At various times during the night you're going to be working with different mixes of lighting and each one requires specific color balance settings. Some guys (and gals) I know just put the camera on automatic and that's fine in some situations but it's not always accurate. Color balance is one of the things I'm working on improving this season along with working on getting sharper images. I have learned a lot so far this year but again like racing I'm seeing limitations as to what the equipment I have is capable of.

For instance, I'm seeing that the Nikon lenses produce a much better image than any of the third party lenses I have used. That includes a couple of Sigmas and a Tamron that cost me over $800 new. My Nikon lens outperforms all three hands down in both color and sharpness. I shot with only third party lenses for four years so I'm comparing years and this year's photos are the best by a long shot. Consequently, I've got some wheeling and dealing to do during the coming off season. I'll review the complete line of Nikon lenses and see what I can find in both fixed focal and zoom styles. I know what focal lengths I need and I'm not looking for a fast lens to use at night because I've got that covered so there might be a deal or two out there.

Well, there's not much else to say right now. I'm looking at my racing schedule trying to find a weekend or two I can take the night off as we get into August. I've got a few traditional dates that I'm locked into so we'll see what we can do. I'm catching some h*ll about not getting much work done on the house this summer. It's been difficult because we lost over a month of weekends to rain at the start and when it isn't raining I'm trying to keep up with my racing commitments. You know, you make all the plans and everything but half way through the season you're thinking, "jeez, that race is going to cost me $80 of gas and if I go to this one over here I'm gonna' have to get a motel." So far so good but when I look at my schedule through October and what it's going to cost I have to put it out of my mind. Picture sales were going good a few weeks ago but I can't count on that going into August. You've got the USA Nationals and those touring drivers don't even know my website exists let alone that they can get a photo from me. And I don't sell many to the IRA drivers or any touring group for that matter. Mostly I get calls and emails wanting pics when I stick around close to home and take photos of all the classes. And August is typically slow with pics anyways but getting into this "specials" part of the schedule I'm sure I'll be dipping into the funds a little deeper.

But you know that going in, that you'll be spending a lot of money chasing this stuff just like you would if you were fishing or snowmobiling or something like that. So you just keep plugging away and if your travel plans get into a corner you just scratch that one and revert to plan B or C. I've always got some alternates on my schedule in case I get in a bind where I can't chase the Sprints. There are always options available.

I'm ramling so I'm going to sign off for the night...

Saturday morning...should I watch cartoons or surf the racing boards?

2008-07-19T07:38:00.001-07:00

Hey it's Saturday morning and all the cartoon shows are on right now. OK, I'm just kidding, when one of the grandkids stays overnight I watch cartoons with them but I don't normally do that. Really, I don't...

So the alternative is to surf the internet and see what the message boards have to offer. One of the boards always has a lot of threads about all wissota classes from eastern Wisconsin to Montana. I'm not hanging on the edge of my seat wondering what happened at some track way out in Montana, Wyoming, the Dakotas or eastern Wisconsin unless it's a touring series I'm familiar with.

Don't take what I'm saying wrong because I enjoy watching the local racing at the nearby tracks. I know quite a few of the people that race and that makes it fun when you can watch people you know. On the other hand, I'll never get to know the drivers who live in the Dakotas, Wyoming, Montana or eastern Wisconsin. I know a couple of the IRA Sprint Car drivers and am familiar with some of the Late Models and Mods but that's a different deal because they race around here with the touring groups. So following everything that's going on in the racing world from coast to coast isn't something I have the time or desire to do.

So it only took a few minutes to catch up on the message board posts. In addition to watching the boards I am keeping a close eye on the weather. The IRA is supposed to race at Deer Creek tonight and I'm hedging whether or not to make the trip with "R" in the area. Ten years ago I wouldn't have hesitated but it's so pricey to run up and down the road anymore that I watch the weather a lot closer. It's pretty gloomy outside here in the Forest Lake area and I see a large area of rain coming across Minnesota this morning. No red spots on the radar, mostly light green, so it looks more like showers than a gully washer.

The alternative plan if weather becomes a problem would be Cedar Lake. That's nearby and costs about $10 in gas as opposed to Deer Creek that I'd estimate at $50. Another factor (and I'm not complaining but this would be nice to know before spending the gas money) is that we haven't received an acknowledgment from the track that my photographer's clearance has been approved. I talked to a friend a little while ago who knows the promoters and said he would call on my behalf. He warned me that I would want to be absolutely 100% sure before making the trip so it's going to weigh on my decision if I don't know that for sure. Steve Sinclair appreciates our coverage and gave us a standing invitation to help get us setup at any of the IRA races so maybe I should have called Steve. Better safe than sorry, I don't want to make a 250 mile round trip for nothing with these gas prices the way they are.

So we've got weather moving in and uncertainty about which track I'm going to attend. It seems like it's been this way almost every time I have traveled this season. Sometimes I get a little jealous of the ATD writers and photographers because those guys get an identification good any time at all the wissota tracks. They don't need to contact the promoter in advance, that's why when you read Ed R or Jerry O's columns in ATD they can change their destination to another track while in route when weather is an issue. In this part of the country if you're not working for the official publication traveling requires more advance planning. I submit photos to ATD and get some of my stuff in there once in a while but I'm on my own at the gate. Ironically, one card carrying photographer told me he had only gotten two photos into the paper for the entire year but they still gave him one of their passes. I think so far this season four or five of my photos have appeared in ATD but I'll never qualify for one of their passes so I'm limited to helping them out once in a while. I understand where they're coming from, they need more of a commitment and I can't give that to them but I don't mind helping out when I'm the only one shooting at one of their tracks. That happens every now and then, especially when I fill in at Kopellah or I get a shot that nobody else caught I think they might like.

So we'll see what happens later today. I looked out on the deck and it just started sprinkling a few minutes ago. Stay tuned...

Watching the weather on Wednesday...

2008-07-16T18:25:00.000-07:00

It's Wednesday evening July 16 and it's about that time when I usually start watching the weekend weather. So far it's looking like we're going to have a rainy couple of days but Saturday doesn't look as bad so far. My two options this Saturday are the Deer Creek IRA show or if the chance of rain is too high then I'll opt for Cedar Lake's weekly program. There was a time when it didn't bother me to take a chance on a 250 mile round trip regardless of the weather. In today's world it amounts to about a $35 difference in gas. I remember a couple times when Cedar Lake rained out and racing was still on down at Jackson so I'd change plans at the last minute. Now it's about a $70 trip and requires some advance planning so that rules out last minute trips unless I hit the jackpot at Hinckley.

Anyways, I'm always excited to see Sprint Cars, especially the IRA, and they're in the area for the next two weekends. Deer Creek kind of snuck up on me. For some reason that I can't remember I removed it from my schedule. I think going into the season I wasn't sure how much of a budget I'd have so I was real conservative on scheduling races out of town when I couldn't share the ride with someone. Unfortunately this weekend my two main travel companions GRP and Vinster won't be available and my son Les has cut back on his racing this year. That leaves it up to me to make sure the Ranger is up to the task and that I've got enough gas money to make the trip. Maybe this would be a good weekend to take the Olds and make sure that one is running alright. If the wife doesn't have anything going maybe I'll do that. It's got air and cruise which makes the trips on hot July days more pleasurable. We'll see how it goes and what the weather does.

I think I missed the IRA at Deer Creek last year but it must have been the year before that Les and I went there. That's a good place for me to stay under the radar and keep a low profile. Maybe I can get a few shots for my driver gallery while I'm there. I wanted to get a couple last Saturday night but I got lazy and didn't push myself to fill an agenda last weekend.

Typically I arrive at the tracks around 4pm and spend a couple hours walking the pits talking to people and distributing MRC if I'm traveling. Then I'll run around with my zoom lens and monopod during hot laps and/or time trials. I'll take driver portraits in the pits usually during the Heat races then go down to the infield for the Features. Most of the time it ends up being around six hours, most of it on my feet. When the races are over my back and feet ache so I usually like get in the truck and get on the road as soon as possible so I can sit down. I carry a folding chair into the infield when I'm taking photos and should probably take a few more breaks so I can pace myself. And it wouldn't hurt to drop about 25#...

On that note I think I'm going to sign out for the night so we'll type to ya' again soon.

Stan