NASCAR Practice at Rockingham

With the NASCAR season kicking off at the Daytona 500 next weekend, we just happened to see an ad on Facebook from Rockingham (AKA: THE ROCK!) that they were hosting two days of NASCAR practices in late January! Not a race, not qualifying, and no fifty dollar tickets! It was just a couple of plain old NASCAR teams running cars and trucks around the Rockingham oval for practice and testing. Open to the public! Food trucks! FREE! I'm retired! Let's go!

THE ROCK!

STOP! Wait a minute. Some dumb winter storm rolled over most of the USA, and the Rockingham practice was moved to February 3-4. OK, no big deal, so NOW let's go!

Not a large crowd, and it was chilly, but there were cars and trucks on track!

STOP AGAIN! ANOTHER dumb storm rolled in to the Carolinas and dumped nearly a foot of snow on the track, so it was moved AGAIN and then combined into one day on Friday February 6th. This storm was so bad it ALSO forced the NASCAR kick-off in Winston-Salem to move from Sunday to Monday, and then to Wednesday of this same week.  NOW LET'S GO! 

I drove up to Rockingham and enjoyed just cruising across some non-Interstates and listening to the radio. Sure enough, they had FREE parking. They had FREE admission! And they had FREE noisy trucks and cars running laps on track! Did I mention it was all FREE? That's some pretty good entertainment for not much money right there! 

In the first hour for the cars, smoke on the track...

So the trucks would have the track for an hour, then the cars, and etc. I admit I didn't stay for all day, but I enjoyed seeing the cars on track. In the very first hour for the cars, one driver had an issue as judged by the big cloud of smoke on the front straight, and that he pulled over in turn 1. This brought out the yellow caution flags (really electric lights) and all the cars came off the track. The track crew did a great job of getting out there, taking care of the driver, and towing his car off the track. They also spread kitty litter (or whatever they use) to soak up a line of fluid from the start/finish into turn 1. Then a big sweeper truck swept that mostly up, followed by two blowers that cleaned up the track. Once the track was clear the cars got back to green light running, and they missed very little time on track. 

Putting down the absorbent material, sweeper truck ready to go, and then a blower truck to clean it all off. 

In the next hour of truck running, there was an even shorter yellow, for one truck that lightly grazed the wall coming out of turn 2 and pulled into the pit. In this case the other trucks came off the track, and one truck drove out to the wall to make sure it was ok. There must have been no damage, because the green light came back on very quickly, and the sound of trucks running at full speed soon returned.