Allen Johnson
The spring Vegas event is in the books. It’s always one of my favorites. I took part in another NHRA Fan Fest, this time at Town Square Mall. It’s hard to top what we do at the fall Vegas race, having the Fan Fest at the Fremont Street Experience, with the huge screen overhead playing NHRA videos, but we had a great crowd at the new venue. There was also a great turnout of drivers, including Funny Car racers Matt Hagan and Jack Beckman, who run with Mopar power like I do. And the weather was just freaking awesome, like it was during the entire Vegas event.
In qualifying at Vegas we made a couple of good runs and a couple of marginal runs in our Mopar Dodge Avenger. But our first round run during eliminations was one of the best we’ve made in awhile, a 6.738-second pass at 205.35 mph to beat Johnny Gray. Then we boo-booed in the second round. We just messed up. We let the two guys in front of us make our decision for us when we should have run our own race. We should have taken the left lane, because the right hadn’t been good all weekend. The decision bit us, and we lost to Greg Anderson, but hopefully we’ll learn from it and move on.
I didn’t have time to take in any Vegas shows with my wife, Pam. I DID have a little time do some gambling, though. This trip didn’t go as well as the last one back in November. I left a little of what I won last time out there; Vegas will always get you in the end.
Mopar recently started up a new channel on YouTube, “Mopar Captured,” and the first video posted was a recap of my weekend debuting the Mopar Dodge Avenger at the NHRA Winternationals back in February, so that was cool. I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback on it after I posted a link to the video on my Facebook page. I try to keep up on Facebook, so if you’re on it hit me up with a friend request.
Last weekend was Pam’s birthday, so it was nice to have an off-weekend from racing to celebrate her big day with some festivities. We went to a spa on Saturday and then I had her a cookout and birthday party on Sunday. We’re flying to St. Louis today, where I’ve advanced to two finals but haven’t yet won. Hope to have good news to report next week!