From Tiff

Blog Entry

What A Year!

I know I haven’t written a blog in over a year, but I wanted to share a quick recap of this season. I started the year off at Langley Speedway in Hampton, VA in my late model (NASCAR Whelen All-American Series).     click here for more

Best In The Desert Off-Road Event

Race Updates From The Road (Tiffany will be updating while on the road during her race weekend)     click here for more

Catching Up

My schedule has been a whirlwind of activities since I last wrote. I ran four races, went to Bristol with Cliff, attended the Rockingham ARCA race, and worked both the Cup and Nationwide tests at Lowe’s Motor Speedway (LMS) – and those were just the major events! It suffices to say that I am one of those people who is not happy unless I am completely busy.     click here for more

Concord Race Report

The last couple of weeks have been extremely busy. On top of my usual work/workout/VA on weekends to work on the cars routine, a couple of exciting events occurred and I went to Caraway with the 41 Cup team as they shook the car down prior to the Martinsville race.  The first event was the Make-A-Wish night at Tijuana Flats. Cliff, Devyn and I went to thank everyone for coming (10% of all purchases went to Make-A-Wish) and hand out information about the Make-A-Wish Foundation.      click here for more

Crewing, Announcing, & Engineering: But A Driver Always

First, I would like to say thank you for all of the congratulatory messages I received last week after the Kara Hendrick Memorial Award press release. I really appreciate all of the support! Second, I want to say good job to Craig Goess, Jr. for completing his first two Late Model Stock Car races the weekend of March 15 at Southern National Raceway Park (SNRP) in Kenly, NC.  Craig will be racing in the Camping World East Series (CW East) this year for Eddie Sharp Racing, and he ran my car to get extra seat-time before his CW East debut.    click here for more

Indy, Phoenix, & More

There are so many things I could talk about this time, but I’m just going to highlight a few of the best ones. At the top of the list was my trip to Indianapolis for Phase II of the Lyn St. James Driver Development Program. I flew to Indy on Friday (2/29) after having all of my flights delayed and getting switched to a different airline.    click here for more

Building Momentum

To start off this week, I want to share an email I received from a fan in Germany. I answered Gunther’s autograph request, and he sent a thank-you email in reply.  I’m including it because it’s really nice and I think it’s so exciting that there are fans of U.S. short track racing in Europe! Here’s the email:     click here for more

Daytona 500!!

All last week in the shop the theme was Daytona. Speedweeks is an exciting time between qualifying, practices, the Duels, the Truck and Nationwide races, and of course the 500.  The Ganassi cars did not fare so well in qualifying, but were quick in race trim in all of the practices, particularly Reed and the 41 team, which gave us hope.     click here for more

The Bigger Picture

Last week was a fairly normal work week.  We prepared the Ganassi cars to leave for Daytona and then were able to do some catching up in the shop.  On Friday, I went home to Smithfield (in southeastern VA). Cliff, his girlfriend Devyn, and I all rode together on the 5-hour drive, which was great because I got to sleep some of the way to help me recover from “the plague.”  “The plague” is what I heard someone call the flu that is going around. I think most of Ganassi was sick last week, which is how I got it.     click here for more

Marketing & “The Test in the West”

I mentioned last time that I would be attending a marketing summit this past weekend.  I went on Saturday and Sunday to listen to speakers from various areas of the business side of racing (i.e. Kymberly Brantigan [PR], Annamarie Malfitana-Strawhand [web design/marketing], Gray Abercrombie [sponsorship (Lowe’s)], Randy LaJoie [driver safety], Peter Visconti [driver development], Matt Yocum [media], etc.).  I heard a lot of new tips and ideas that will be very helpful in putting together sponsorship proposals, marketing myself, and presenting myself to others. Annamarie Strawhand was particularly knowledgeable about web sites and driver marketing tools.    click here for more

My Version of the “Off”-Season

During the off-season, I have been extremely busy trying to prepare for the upcoming season. Actually, “off-season” is a terrible name for the time in between race seasons. I think it should be called “preparation-and-long-hours season” or “strip-your-cars-and-rebuild-them-as-fast-as-you-can season” or even just “testing season.”    click here for more

Date

10-13-09

08-20-08

05-21-08

04-10-08

03-25-08

03-11-08

02-26-08

02-19-08

02-13-08

02-04-08

01-21-08