Saturday 29th May Indianapolis

This morning Wayne kindly drove Lauren, Thomas, Olivia and I (Bernise) into Indianapolis City to see the Indy 500 Parade. It was about 9.45 and quite hot already. Many of the streets were blocked off so we had a little way to walk. Passing a few Starbucks I couldn’t help myself I had to get my fix for the day? As it happened just across the road was a fantastic spot on the corner in the shade. Glenys (Scotts mother) said we had to get there early, and boy was she right we sat waiting for nearly 2 hours and ended up packed around us. The parade went on for two hours, and was fantastic, we lucked it by being on the side of the road that Scott came down. Before he reached us we got our large silver fern flag out and waved it around (probably looked like plonkers) but it was well worth it, we definitely got a lot of attention and Scotts face lit up with a huge smile, he yelled back… thanks for coming, thanks so much… and you could see he meant it… It was a huge buzz and made the wait well worthwhile.
Hi it’s Thomas again, I saw Scott Dixon on the back of a Ute with his wife in the parade. We waved our flag and said Scott Dixon loud, he turned around and he was really pleased to see us. There was a big floating man that nearly fell onto the crowd, which was very funny.

While the kids went to the parade I went with the boys to John Forces race manufacturing facility and wow was it immmppprrreessive. They look after 4 separate team cars and there are 4 funny-cars each, two in the trailer and two under construction plus the parts trucks has enough to build another car, that’s 20 cars between them. Another impressive aspect is that they have about 20 milling machines for which they bring in big solid chunks of billet alloy and then proceed to carve almost every single part on the engine starting with a huge chunk for the block, about the only parts they don’t make is the valves and bearings. The design concepts and experimental department is constantly looking for an edge and they showed us a few blown up parts that didn’t quite make the grade. Effectively the only FORD part on the funny-cars is the Badge everything else is custom. They take 70 guys to each meeting and have another 25 back at base full time. Castrol (there sponsor) must have very deep pockets. The plant also has a big museum with about 10 previously campaigned cars and a showroom full of goodies, Robert Hight one of the star drivers present was signing autographs so I had him make one out to Stephen my Brother. This took care of half a day. On top of John Force was the Lucas Geico Top Fuel Dragster facility… again very impressive, we took in two speedway manufacturing plants and the Vance and Hines motorcycle set up…. This knocked the day out IN STYLE.

The evening held yet another treat.. a nearby track has a Speedway Sprintcar (small Block V8s) meeting (on tarmac) and 2 Wings and Slicks (like our formula Toyota Class) classes one with 2 lt Mazda motors and another quicker Rotary class… petrolhead heaven. The famdamily all came home thoroughly worn out.