Since I've been back from Pomona, I've been running nonstop. For me, the off season starts with year-end planning; meeting with the crew chiefs to go over all of the expenses and review all of the big ticket items that are on order - race car chassis, engine blocks, clutch discs, clutch floaters and blowers, just to name a few. I'm always amazed to see the amount of parts that run through one of these programs over the course of a year! We also finalized the paint scheme for the 2011 Motorcraft/Quick Lane Shelby Mustang Funny Car. This is an important item to get done as soon as possible. We need plenty of time to get the cars wrapped and it determines the design of the crew shirts, fire suits and awning designs.
I think I was home a week and then left again for Las Vegas. I was invited to be a guest speaker for the Motorsports Marketing Forum. It's always great to participate in these types of forums because you get to meet all the big names in the industry. I sat on a panel discussing the State of Motorsports. The panel included Brad Brown, Senior Director of Sports Marketing, Anheuser-Busch; Joie Chitwood, President, Daytona International Speedway; David Grant, Principal, Team Epic and Velocity Sports & Entertainment; Steve Lauletta, President, Earnhardt Ganassi Racing; and Steve O'Donnell, Senior Vice President of Racing Operations, NASCAR. It was a great discussion. Certainly, with the state of the economy, it has been a challenging time for the industry but I came away with a great feeling for our sport. NHRA has really weathered the economic storm in a strong way compared to other motorsport bodies. That's a great testament to our fans!!
I don't think I was in Vegas for 24 hours and then I was back on a plane to get home. I didn't want to miss the birth of my fourth son, Dylan Anthony Tasca. He was born on December 7th. Terri and Dylan are doing well, as are our other sons, Bobby, Austin and Cameron. Dylan is a future Ford driver for sure!
This week I'm heading to Charlotte for a team Christmas party and a bunch of meetings. Before you know it we will be heading out to Palm Beach for a week long test session from January 31st through February 4th. We are going to end the test session with a match race on Friday night. There will be a bunch of Dragsters and Funny Cars there. If you happen to be in the Palm Beach. Florida, area on the 4th of February, swing by to see us.
Thanks to all my friends and fans for a terrific 2010 season. I wish all of you a great holiday season and happy, healthy new year.
This was our 13th year doing the car show and it was bittersweet in a lot of ways. It was the first year that my grandfather wasn’t there and it was also on September 11th. But the weather was tremendous and the turnout was beyond description. Our Tasca Ford dealership was packed with Mustangs and people for the entire day.
We had three rock and roll bands plus a Beach Boys Tribute band at the dealership. The atmosphere was exciting. Some of the most amazing Ford show cars that I’ve ever seen were on display. People came as far as Kentucky to be a part of the show.Special guests John Force, Tim Wilkerson and Daniel Wilkerson came in along with Alan Reinhart for an autograph session along with a Q & A session that was a lot of fun.
The car show was all honoring my grandfather. This is what he loved about the business. He loved interacting with our customers, being around Ford performance vehicles and show vehicles that span generations. We had Model As all the way up to the Ford GT. From the show car standpoint and the atmosphere it was one of the best, if not the best show that we’ve put on at our dealership. We raised probably 15,000 pounds of can goods to benefit the local food bank so it was all for a good cause.
We also made the announcement of our partnership with Factory Five. We are going to be building roller chassis for the hot rod coupe Ford designed back in 1933, with a state of the art powertrain. We’re going to have the five liter engine that Ford Racing sells as a crate motor as one of the options that customers can put in along with a slew of other Ford Racing engines. We won’t be putting the engines in the cars, we’re going to be just building rollers, but they’ll be designed to take Ford Racing powertrains of the customer’s choice.
It was an action packed day to be a part of. We also use it as a team building initiative from our standpoint. It’s nice to get the guys together. My whole race team was in town and spent a couple of days and dinners together. On Thursday night we went fishing with the guys. It’s nice to break from the normal routine every once in a while and have an opportunity to reflect on the season and look forward to the next five races. For our championship hopes, Charlotte, Dallas are two of the races where we need to do very well, if not win both of them to get us solidly into the championship fight as this season winds down.
We have a busy week heading into Indy. Last week, we attended an NHRA test session in Indianapolis and I’m really glad we did. We gained a lot of valuable data from those two test days. At the end of the session, we were on top of the charts with the quickest and fastest run with a 4.07 second pass at nearly 310 miles per hour.
Over the last few weeks, we’ve been struggling with lifters. We’ve had lifter failure at the last couple of races and we also had a lifter failure on the test session, so we made some changes. All of us, my crew chiefs Chris Cunningham and Marc Denner and the entire team, were very happy with the remainder of the test session. You always learn something when you drive these Funny Cars and the teams always learn something. We will use the test data to help us run some quick times during the Friday and Saturday night runs in Indianapolis.
After the test, I was off to Montreal. I was invited by Ford Racing and Ford of Canada to participate in the Ford Racing Crescent Street Festival that is held in conjunction with the NASCAR Nationwide Series race. Even though my trip was short, I had a great experience. I hadn’t been to Canada in a long time and just to see the excitement and enthusiasm for racing was really cool. What was really neat about the whole thing, a lot of people had never seen a fuel Funny Car before, so to have the opportunity to talk and explain it to them was amazing. To see their reactions at just how cool they thought my Motorcraft/Quick Lane Funny Car was and they saw our film on a lot of the different runs we made.
Then I was blown away by how many people actually knew what we did, who we were and actually followed the sport of NHRA racing from Canada. It was a great experience, a lot of fun. Ford had just a wonderful presence up and down the street. I flew home on Sunday and we’re just a few days away from heading out to Indianapolis for arguably the biggest race of the year.
The boys are back in hockey now too. They had a hockey tournament this past weekend, the first of the season with practice and tryouts. As our NHRA season is staring to wind down, their hockey season is just starting. I know the boys are excited about it. I missed the tournament this past weekend but I was getting blow by blow via text messages. I’m not sure who is more excited to get back – the boys to hockey or me to the race track.
If you are coming to Indianapolis, be sure to stop by and say hello. We’re running the FordParts.com paint scheme this weekend. That blue and white Mustang brought me some good fortune our way in Englishtown. Let’s see if we can get that magic back and bring home another Wally!
Last week we were in Brainerd and ended the regular season. We had a great first round win against John Force, man, there was inches separating John and I throughout the entire run. I think that’s been kind of a trend here these last couple of races. There’s just be incredible side-by-side racing with literally inches separating cars going over 300 mile per hour. Then we lost a tight race in the second race against Bob Bode.
Now that the regular season over, our sights are set on the championship. These next six races are going to be action packed. The first three are certainly going to pose their challenges with some warmer conditions. Then with the last three I think you’ll see some record setting runs in the Top Fuel classes.
Five out of the ten Top Fuel Funny Cars are Fords. Ford has definitely positioned themselves to be tough to beat here going into the Countdown.
Next week, I’m going to be going to Montreal for the Ford Racing Crescent Street Festival. This is my first venture to Montreal for the street festival and I’m looking forward to it. Ford of Canada hosts the street festival every year during the NASCAR Nationwide race at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve. We’re going to have our Funny Car out there on Crescent Street and spend a couple of days up there which should be pretty neat. They say the crowds up there you can get up to 300,000 people come through that event.
After Montreal, we’ll be right back into racing at Indianapolis and the final races of the 2010 season. Indy kicks of the Countdown and we’re planning to come out of the gate strong and build momentum. To win a championship you’re going to have to pick up your fair share of wins over these next six races. I can’t wait.
I want to thank all of my fans for supporting Motorcraft, Quick Lane Ford Motor Company. The best part of our season is just ahead of us and I can tell you that our team is ready to go.
Thanks for checking in and I’ll see you at the race track.
Hello Race Fans!We had an exciting week in Houston.For the second year in a row, I was invited to tour the NASA Johnson Space Center.Last year I had a terrific time and made some good friends with astronauts Mark Kelly and his twin brother Scott. The father and son duo of Mike and Jeff Fox are engineers at NASA and they were instrumental in this year’s tour.I would say the coolest part of my job is meeting people in other industries and developing new relationships.
The NASA folks were kind enough to invite me back and this time it was action packed, to say the least. I had a chance to fly the shuttle simulator, taking the space shuttle out of orbit and landing it at Cape Canaveral. It wasn’t a clean landing, but it was survivable. It always helps to know that you have a master commander in Scott Kelly next to you to give you some coaching instructions. It was a lot of fun.
We also went to see the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, or the NBL.The NBL has the world’s largest pool with 6.2 million gallons of water.In the pool is about two-thirds of the International Space Station.Mike Fox gave us a tour of the NBL and showed us how the astronauts train in the pool.We learned that for every hour the astronauts are scheduled to be on a space walk, they spent 10 hours in the pool.Amazing.
I found that really interesting how buttoned down and organized they are and that their working procedures are not that different than what we do on our Motorcraft/Quick Lane Shelby Mustang. They have various double-check procedures and ‘Plan B’ scenarios that we don’t necessarily have. At the end of the day, they’re dealing with life or death situations, no different than what we deal with. There were a lot of things that I could compare to our race team – especially from the safety aspect where you need to be extra organized and double-check every task.
The check and balance that they have at NASA, we have on our race car as well. For example, when we torque the wheels, we have two different people at two different times torque the rear tires. Often we get asked why we have the double-check – that’s because of the speeds and the risks that we have, no different than they have with the space program. It’s always nice to see the same safety precautions in other fields.
What I really liked about my experience at NASA was to drive the Lunar Electric Rover. Antron Brown and I got a shot at taking it up some mountains and craters.We went out to a special field at NASA where they had two areas – one area simulated the ground on Mars while the other was the Moon.A lot of people find the engineering on our race car fascinating, but I found the engineering that they do fascinating. It was just incredible the capabilities of the Lunar Electric Rover. It was the anti-Funny Car. Whatever they could do, we couldn’t do and vice versa. From climbing up hills, and into craters and going up boulders, you can really see the challenges they have to overcome. They really have to get it right because where they’re going, there’s no pit crew to fix the problem. From all the training and testing on the ground, they hopefully will be prepared for what they see when they get back to the Moon or to Mars.
After NASA tour on Thursday, we were back to business on Friday at the race track. Houston was a transitional race for us. My grandfather must have been looking down from above because he had a motto that you never test on race day, and you never want to test on race day. But we have committed to make this change to put in the BOSS 500 platform into our Shelby Mustang. It’s absolutely imperative for us to make this change in order to compete for a championship.
I look at last year and for me, evaluating the season, we did exceptional going into the Countdown - we were fourth in the points. Then we fell off when the conditions came back to what they were like earlier in the season and we didn’t have a tune-up that could compete with the 4.04, 4.05 category. We believe this BOSS 500 platform has that.
Unfortunately, we have to make this change during the season, but I’m very confident in our team and very confident about the progress we made in Houston. In Las Vegas, we won’t be in test mode. We’ll still be working, but we have some great data to look at from our Houston runs and unfortunately we raced Del Worsham and he ran low ET of the round, and I think we would have beat twelve other drivers in the first round.
We have all of the key elements of the BOSS 500 platform in our Shelby Mustang and I think we’re poised to really break out with some really big numbers. There’s a lot of racing ahead. Five races have only gone by. I don’t even look at where we are in the points at this point. It’s such a small spread between where we are and the top five in the points. I’m excited about the BOSS engine. I’m excited about Las Vegas. I love the track in Vegas. It’s a track I’ve been at many times, it’s a great city to race in and I think we have as good a chance as anybody out there to qualify top one through four and compete for the trophy on Sunday.
We’re going to take advantage of one of our test sessions in Vegas where we’ll be able to refine this BOSS 500 platform even more. We’re in full tilt here. This is a team that’s not happy with how we did in Charlotte and Houston. We expect more at every race. Whether you win or not, sometimes you need a little luck to win some of these races, but competing for that trophy is what we want to do. There were some lessons learned in Charlotte and Houston, and we’ll apply those in Vegas. Learn on Monday in Vegas with our test session and start to turn the heat up as this season unfolds.
My grandfather always wanted, to a certain degree, for John Force’s program and our Tasca Racing program to work together. He thought the world of John and sometimes when I would beat Force on the track, I don’t know if he was happy or sad. He was always very close with John and his camp and obviously thought the world of what John had done on the race track. He isn’t here to see what we’ve been able to put together, but I know he’s up there smiling at us from above.
Tasca Racing and John Force Racing are still two separate race teams that compete to win a race on Sunday, no different than we’ve done in the past. When it comes to Ford technology, and all of the investment and engineering that John’s team and Ford have done in his program over the years, that’s where we’re really going to come together and work. This is not only to put the BOSS technology in our Motorcraft/Quick Lane Shelby Mustang, but to continue to develop the technology both from a safety standpoint and performance standpoint. We made that big announcement at Charlotte. There’s a great picture that comes to my mind, where we’re all in the circle with our hands in the middle, and I think it shows the unity of Ford Motor Company, John Force Racing and Tasca Racing. A major turning point in my racing career, and I know it’s a turning point for John and for Ford to bring these teams together at a certain level. We want to both win on Sunday and we’ll let the chips fall where they may.
This isn’t something that just developed in the last three months. The Tasca Family and the Force family have shared a special relationship that has spanned for many years. There’s no question about that. It’s only natural for the all-Ford car to get tapped into the all-Ford power with the BOSS set-up. It’s a win-win for John. It’s a win-win for us. We have struggled with cool weather tune-ups. Although we’ve made progress, we haven’t got to the level where we know we need to be at so this gives us a big advantage. Looking at it long term, lining the Force camp and our camp and Ford to continue to develop performance and safety technology, is a win for all three. A lot of good stuff has come out of the last couple of weeks.
Just before I left for Pomona, my brother Michael got married and my cousin Carl, and I were the best men. We had a lot of fun that day.Michael and Brianna had their reception at the same place where Terri and I had ours - the Alpine Country Club. It was great to be around so many friends and family for such a happy occasion.With everything that has happened over the last several months, it was nice to celebrate. My boys had a role in the wedding too, they were the ring bearers. It was a big event for them, because they had never been in a wedding before. They got in their tuxedos and they were about as happy as you can believe to be a part of the wedding. They were really excited about it. They got a kick out of walking down the aisle in front of everyone. I’m happy to welcome my new sister-in-law, Brianna, to our family.
On my way to Pomona, I made a pit stop at the Cobra Jet assembly plant in Flat Rock, Michigan. It was real special because the Cobra Jet was the car that my grandfather really pioneered. On the flight to Detroit, I wondered how many manufacturers would have invested all this time and energy into building a special run of 50 cars? When you look at the big picture, there will be over 13 million cars sold in America, and yet Ford designated a team of people, and dedicated an assembly line for 50 cars. It’s a tribute to the importance Ford Motor Company places on its racing programs and its dedication to the Ford racers. It was always my grandfather’s passion to support the racer, because they’re really the catalyst in the marketplace. They are the ones that their friends and families go to for advice on cars. They’re the ones that go into their own pocket, spend their own money on race cars, race trailers, racing parts, and are so passionate about their manufacturer. In this case it’s Ford, and for Ford to invest the resources to build 50 cars, it shows how much respect they have for the racing fans, and the racers themselves. It might only be 50 out of 13 million cars sold, but there will be no other vehicles that will create the memories, experiences that those 50 cars will create over the years as racers across the country take them to the track, and put them in the winner’s circle. The Cobra Jet legend lives on.
I know that if my grandfather would have been there, he would have been impressed not only with the outpouring of gratitude and excitement of the racers, but the passion and excitement of all the Ford assembly workers. This was built inside a Ford assembly plant, not an off-site operation. This was built inside the same plant that builds the Mustangs that are in the Ford showrooms today. The excitement of the Ford UAW team at that plant was just incredible. It’s a tribute to the racers, to the UAW workers, and all the people that are involved in that program. I’m looking forward to seeing the 2010 Cobra Jets race this year. We’ve bought one that my Uncle Carl is getting tuned up to get behind the wheel of this season.
I had a few days off between Pomona and Phoenix, so the whole family flew in and met me in Phoenix. It was nice to spend some time with them. We spent a few days at the pool and we also went to the Phoenix Zoo. The best part of the Phoenix Zoo, I would have to say was the monkeys. The kids absolutely loved the monkeys. It was a lot of fun to spend some time with my family.
Even though I have a couple weeks off from the race track, I really have no down time with my involvement with the family dealerships and the race team. We’ll be doing a lot of work here in the next two weeks, gearing up for the Gatornationals at Gainesville. I’m planning on spending a lot of time working in the shop in Charlotte for a few days and then I’m off to Detroit for some meetings before heading back home just in time to get back on the airplane and get on out to Gainesville. There’s a lot going on between now and the Gatornationals, and when you have a car and a team that I know is capable of winning, as a driver you just want to get back out there. I prefer to get right back out and keep racing.I’m looking forward to Gainesville. It’s a race track where I’m coming in as the defending champ. I’ve had a lot of success there in the past.
Hockey Update: We’re heading into the playoffs! After our plane landed from Phoenix, my father-in-law was waiting out front for my son Bobby to head to a hockey game. We literally landed at 6:00 pm and he was on the ice by 6:50 pm. I know the kids are happy to get back to hockey. We have a couple of games the next couple of weeks, and the season ends at the end of March. There will be some tournaments coming up. My older son’s team is in a position to play for the state championship, so we’ll see how that turns out.
