Morning, Amigos. Last we spoke, I had just gone to Bedford with my mom on mother’s day weekend in my Youth Racing Solutions sash. Since then, some things have changed. And it’s all positive!!
In June I signed on with Team Dirt Dog!! If you’ve never heard of DIRT DOG GEAR, then kindly crawl out of your cave and get a social media account or visit DirtDogGear.com. Actually, I’m going to highly recommend the social media account anyway—and it should be twitter (@queenielainey is how you can follow along with my racing and non-racing shenanigans and @teamdirtdog is how you can follow theirs!). TDD is a media, merchandising, and marketing company based in Tennessee that ships merchandise, wait for it, GLOBALLY. It’s also a neat company to get involved with if you’re an actual car or team owner, because they will partner with drivers to raise money for your program. It’s win-win. Anyway, back to the meat and potatoes of it, I’m representing their brand for the remainder of the season as Miss Dirt Dog!! After a couple of lengthy emails and phone conversations, I fell in love with the philosophy and the values of the company and I’m happy to say I think I’ve found a fun place to stay for a while as a victory lane representative.
So I packed up my new sash and headed to Lernerville this past weekend for the World of Outlaw Late Model Firecracker 100 weekend. To say that the weather “did not look good” would have been akin to saying “no, no, go ahead… light that candle near the freshly poured gallon of gasoline, I think you’ll be able to avoid the fumes”… i’m not going to lie, people: I was NOT optimistic. But I got on the road Thursday after work all the same, and it rained on the way down. And it rained til I got there… and then it kinda stopped raining. And the sun came out. And I texted my friend in the next town over to find out when he was coming to the track and he said that he wasn’t in a hurry because of the pouring rain- and I told him it wasn’t pouring at the track, it was actually SUNNY. I was met with disbelief, but anyway. So then if you can believe it, it didn’t rain through the entire race program. Eric Westendorf and the entire Lernerville team kept the program moving at break-neck speed and nobody got wet! The group of people running the show in Sarver, PA, really know what they’re doing. In the end, Shane Clanton ended up parking it in victory lane with me, but let me tell you: Jared Miley was a contender and really showed his grit (both nights, actually).
I’m going to pause here and just say that I don’t understand why more girls don’t go dirt track racing. Even under the premise of running a SUPER fast-paced show to beat any rain that might have been on the way, the competition and the drama of it is amazing. Girls love drama, right?? Anyway. At some point, someone looked at me and asked if I came by myself. YES, sometimes you just really want to go racing and nobody else does, so you go alone. It’s not like I won’t know people when I get there, and it’s not like I can’t make friends (kinda the point)… anyway. So if any girls out there are reading this and want to go dirt racing with me, even if you’ve never been… I’ll take you. Stick with me, kid, we’ll go places.
For night two, I decided to bring a friend along—my mom! (There’s a trend here… she’s hopefully going to be racing with me a couple other times this summer!) She met me at the track after work and once again we had BEAUTIFUL weather. We bought ourselves a bag of beer and got cozy in turn 4 after a quick lap through the pits to make appearances. When I say we bought ourselves a bag of beer, I mean MOM WENT TO THE STAND AND ORDERED SO MUCH BEER… I don’t know what she was doing, I expected her to come back with a 6 pack but .. she just had so many cans. Anyway, night 2 was much much dustier than night 1—but just as fast-paced. Big E and the WoO team did not waste any time, and before I knew it (without any pageantry or fluff or time for me to get in the infield for the feature) Chase Junghans was taking the checkers. And good for him!! So we marched down to victory lane, and I even had a partner in crime! Gerald Netwon of GottaRace graciously loaned his daughter for the duty of Miss Firecracker and she’s so pretty. She handed Chase his hat, I handed him the trophy, and then it was all over… for racing anyway. And it still hadn’t rained! So I kept my dress on and decided to sign some autographs (some guy’s chest? Another guy’s suspenders?) and then party it up. Headed to the Froggy concert pavilion and danced a little!
Then, as all things must do, it came to an end for us and we called it a night. Sleepover at my house!!
Since you’re probably already a racefan and you probably don’t live in the cave I mentioned above, then you probably also already know that Lernerville didn’t run night 3 of the Firecracker with the 100-lap A-Main (among other scheduled sideshows like the Uncle Sam for non-qualifiers). The weather was a disaster on Saturday and there was just no way—so they rescheduled to September. If you’re wondering what I did, I capitalized: my friend had a bachelorette night and I attended. It was a lot less clay dust in my hair and nose, but it was equally as fun on a different level.
So what did we learn here? I love racing (by myself or with others), mom needs some guidance when it comes to how much beer to buy, and team dirt dog is newly well-represented in the northwestern Pennsylvania region.
Stay tuned for my next entry—Winner Wednesday. I interview Chase and Shane for fun, and to keep the new tradition going.
Where am I going next? Glad you asked. Cancel your plans, because we’re going to Sharon Speedway for the Lou Blaney memorial on July 11th.
<3/
Miss Dirt Dog
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