In this blog I'd like to talk a little about maintenance and preparation for the next season. Maintenance is a simple deal that is way to often overlooked. I'm as guilty as the next person of not maintaining the race car the way you should.
O.K. this is not a complicated deal, while we still have time. More than likely you all have everything apart for the most part. Take this time to check everything. When I say everything, that is exactly what I mean. I've been around for awhile, and have seen people make the simple mistake of not paying attention to their car.
If you want to have a successful race team you have to treat that race car like it's your family. Spend a lot of time with it, you have to spend a lot of time with the race car.
Make sure everything is free, what I mean by this is no binding in the suspension. Take everything apart and clean it or do whatever you can to make sure it's free.
If you all will think about this for awhile you will know what all you will need to check. I could probably sit here and make a list of things that need to be done, and things that need to be checked in the off-season. I'm not going to do that because I couldn't cover it all.
What I will do is give you all some ideas to think about while we prepare for 2008. First, the most important thing is to be prepared for anything. A good example is: at the first of the year last year we went to a track that we had been to before. We thought we knew what to expect, well, we were way wrong. We got there expecting a smooth and somewhat medium grip racetrack. What we found was a rough and heavy track, our first bad mistake. We did not have a package put together for those conditions, so we were done before we even started.
1. be prepared for anything (no matter how well you know the track)
2. see #1