Allen Johnson
I recently paid a visit to Glenwood Elementary School in my hometown of Greeneville, Tenn., right before the NHRA St. Louis event. My wife Pam’s friend, Shandi, has a daughter named Riley, and she asked me to come out to her school for the Glenwood Fun Day. I came to Riley’s classroom and visited, signed personal autographs and talked about what we do. I showed video of one of our runs and of the winner’s circle at the Mopar® Mile-High Nationals.
The kids asked a lot of questions. We tried to keep it to subjects regarding science or math, or something they could learn a little bit from, but they asked questions like if I had ever wrecked, or how fast I can go. Some of them said 1,200 mph! One little girl raised her hand and said, “My grandfather just loves you!” I got a lot of comments like that. It’s really amazing how many of the kid’s parents watch us on TV. After my classroom visit the whole school went out into the auditorium, and they had tables set up. The kids could spend quarters at each station on different items, and one of the tables was mine. I signed autographs for everybody, but of course, I didn’t charge them a quarter!
It was special to participate in the event for Riley, who I’ve known since she was a baby. I do stuff like that every now and then at schools in the community, career days and fun days. Sometimes I even take our Mopar Dodge Pro Stock car out and do a burnout. It teaches the kids about the importance of education, so maybe when they grow up they can do what we do. And hopefully it makes Mopar enthusiasts out of them!
At St. Louis, Pam wasn’t able to make it out for the race. Without her, when I wasn’t at the track, I was at the casino. You might remember in my last blog I said I left a little money in Vegas—well, I brought some back from St. Louis. Justin Humphreys and I did pretty well out there.
Racing wise, the track at St. Louis was a little iffy, but we were great in qualifying. We probably should have been No. 2 in qualifying, third at least, but fourth wasn’t bad. In eliminations we made a pretty good run in the first round, but in the second round we just went up there and, like in Vegas, made a mistake and shook the tires.
We stayed after on Monday and tested at St. Louis. I feel the test session was very beneficial, just like the session at Dallas prior to the Houston event. I think we figured out a common mistake we’ve been doing that’s been making us shake the tires. We really tested that on Monday back and forth, our old way, our new way, our old way, our new way. It shed light on what we’ve been doing wrong and I believe we made a big gain with that.
We race at Atlanta and Topeka, and then we’ve got a week off and then four in a row. We’ve got six races in the next eight weeks. I really feel good about what we figured out, and I feel like we gained some horsepower on the dyno right before St. Louis and it showed at that race with our speed. So hopefully it all will pay off at Atlanta next weekend.