Offseason? What offseason?

I leave Tuesday to go to Daytona Speedweeks, starting my 13th season covering NASCAR in specific and motorsports in general. That’ll be the first official trip for work I’ve made since the 2008 Sprint Cup finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway.
Several of my friends who regularly read this blog will undoubtedly tell me how little they care about what I did this “offseason.” But I don’t mind. It’s nice to know they’re reading.
Anyway, when I started thinking about what I’ve done just over the past few weeks, I have to laugh at all of those folks who think all I do is “watch cars go around in circles.”
Charlotte and the surrounding area certainly is an interesting place to cover motorsports.
Right after the holidays, for instance, I went to Concord and visited the headquarters of DIRT Motorsports. These are the folks who run the World of Outlaws sprint car and late model racing series, which means they put on as many races in as many different places each year as just about anybody.
One of the guys who works there is named Josh Wells. A couple of weeks later, I talked to Josh’s wife, Amber, who works for NASCAR. The reason I wound up talking to Amber is that she was one of the people on the US Airways flight that landed in the Hudson River. A couple of days after she told me her incredible story over the phone I got to meet her in person at the NASCAR research and development center during the Sprint NASCAR Media Tour hosted by Lowe’s Motor Speedway. Seeing Amber there, high and dry, was one of the highlights of that week.
At that same stop on the media tour I also got to meet the young men and women who’re in the 2009 Drive for Diversity class. One of them is a young woman from Texas named Kristin Bumbera, and I walked up to tell her a story.
I was at All-American Speedway in Roseville, Calif., last summer for twin late model features because another Drive for Diversity driver, Paulie Harraka, is a friend of our radio show on Sirius NASCAR Radio. In the first feature, Bumbera and Harraka raced each other bumper to bumper for 20 or 30 laps and both of them had smoke boiling out of the rear ends of their cars because they were running so hard.
I told her that story and about how I gave Harraka grief for losing that battle in the first feature – Paulie won the second. Bumbera’s eyes flashed over and she started telling me about how her car didn’t last in the second feature or things might have turned out different. I went and found Bobby Hamilton Jr., for whose team Bumbera will race this year, and told him I think he’s got a winner.
The day after the media tour ended my wife and I piled in the car and went to Kentucky to see Wessa Miller and her parents, Booker and Juanita. A year ago on the weekend before I left for Daytona, I decided to try to find the family of the girl who in 1998 gave Dale Earnhardt the lucky penny that he had in his car when he finally won the Daytona 500. Wessa was that girl – she was 6 then – and the story I wound up doing is one of my all-time favorites.
The Millers live in Phyllis, Ky., a little town in the very eastern edge of the Bluegrass State. We spent two afternoons with the family, with whom we’ve become friends. People who read about Wessa and her family wanted to help and they’ve contributed a lot of money to penniesforwessa.org, which the Millers have used to keep their van running and fix up their house to help make Wessa a little more comfortable. All they want me to do is make sure everybody knows how grateful they are to all those who helped. Juanita saved every envelope that came with a donation and she worries every day that she hasn’t yet had time to send each of them a thank you note. Rest assured that eventually, she will.
We got back Monday and I went to the N.C. Motorsports Association’s awards banquet, where you couldn’t help but be impressed by the breadth and scope of how far the motorsports industry reaches into my home state.
Tuesday I went to see Ray Evernham’s new museum and shop in Mooresville, where I met the men who’ll help him run East Lincoln Speedway this summer and also talked to my old friend Doug Herbert, who with help from people like Evernham is planning to challenge land-speed records on the Bonneville Salt Flats later this year.
Wednesday I went to Hendrick Motorsports and watched a bunch of people who are all WAY smarter than I am shake a car like it was a can of paint at Lowe’s (hey, it was the 48 car) on a seven-post machine. My aim was to learn as much as I could about how one of those things works, and if I went there every day for six months I might figure out where the off-on switch is.
I was also trying to find time this week to go up to Denver, N.C., to see the shop where the winning car in this year’s Rolex 24 at Daytona was built. Michael Colucci’s JMC Racing, which fields the Porsche-powered cars for the Brumos team out of Jacksonville, Fla., is working out of the Max Crawford shop until Colucci’s new shop there is finished in the next week or so. Because the move is imminent, though, I had to settle for talking to Colucci while he was driving around in a rainstorm in South Florida.
Speaking of Florida, coming up I’ve got another story about something that David Reutimann has bought and donated to a children’s hospital in St. Petersburg that was built in somebody’s garage in Mooresville. It might be the coolest thing I’ve seen since the end of the 2008 NASCAR season.
OK, that’s enough for now.
Besides, I need to pack a suitcase.