Friday the 13th - Last February, my father had to go into the hospital a day after we were scheduled to leave for our Florida speedway vacation. It was for a routine test but the physician feared it might throw him into kidney failure so Bruce and I cancelled the trip along with plane flights, time share and car rental. In the end it turned out okay and two days after we were scheduled to leave he drove himself home from the hospital and called to tell me I should go on vacation. We decided to drive down to Florida back then and never used the airline tickets. There is an exchange fee but we still said we would use them in the future.

Well time does fly and the future was here before we knew it and it was either use the tickets or lose all the money. So Bruce started looking and he came up with Texas. We had been to the state of Texas in the past but never saw a race there. So on Friday the 13th in the midst of a nor’easter, as the wind blew in Philadelphia, we flew to Houston. It actually was a smooth flight and we only took off 1 hour late. They made up time in the air and we landed only 20 minutes off our scheduled arrival time. It was in the 70’s and sunny when we landed but as the sun went down so did the temperature.

Gator Motorplex in Willis, TX , approximately 40 miles from the airport in Houston, was our destination. But 40 miles in rush hour traffic on a Friday night is not exactly a fast ride. We arrived at the track, a ¼ mile high banked clay oval, at 7:05 and by the time we sat down in the cement stands we had missed the hobby stock heats. Tonight was the first night of a two day show with only qualification being run. In addition to the hobby stocks they had limited modifieds, street stocks, dwarf cars, pure stocks and modifieds. Between the classes we saw they ran 19 heats. The problem was they probably only needed to run 13 heats. The limited modifieds and dwarf cars only ran 5 and 6 cars per heat run and once they got spread out it was like watching warm-ups. You do not need 5 heats for 28 cars or 6 heats for 32 cars even if the track is only ¼ in circumference.

Good thing was they ran the show well and all 19 heats were run in two hours. At 9:00 it was intermission time and it was also cold. The few fans that were in attendance had themselves wrapped in blankets with coats on. Of course I had only a sweatshirt because I was going to Texas where it was still real warm. Wrong! The temperature might only have dropped into the upper 50’s but the dampness went right through you. After a 35 minute intermission they ran 15 lap dash races to determine the starting positions for the main events which were run on Saturday the 14th. First off I do not think dash and 15 laps can be used together unless you are talking Cup cars. How can the heat races be more laps then the dash? Of course the heats races were strange amounts of laps too; some were 7 laps and other were 9 laps within the same division. I stayed for the first two dash races before calling it quits and heading to the car. Bruce watched an additional dash before he too threw in the towel.

The track surface was decent and there was not one speck of dust, the show was run very efficiently, the food was not bad and it was easy to find as it sat right along the Interstate but still at 10:00 (11:00 eastern time) I was done. I guess it was just a long day and I was cold and tired.