My Name is Earl

This month, Ricky and I headed down to Danville, VA to catch the AMA Superbike weekend races. The first highlight of the weekend was during our tour of the vendor booths on Friday. We came upon a booth selling T-Shirts for Second Chance Auto Sales in Owensboro, KY. I commented to Ricky that the used car dealership in question was owned by Nicky Hayden's father Earl. The man tending the booth turned around and there was Squirrel, aka Earl Hayden. I took the opportunity to speak with Earl about his boys. He told me that he had just spoken to Nicky in Brno (Czech Republic) and it had just rained at the upcoming MotoGP race. I thought this was very cool, and the proof is below:


I bought a shirt from Earl and he even autographed it.

The second highlight occurred during the pair of races on Saturday. Suzuki set up a hospitality tent between turns 4 & 5 and as a card-carrying 'Busa owner, Ricky was able to get us a couple of seats in the tent. We watched both the first Superbike Race and the Supersport Race out of the sun with free food. As an extra bonus, Rockstar was giving away cans of their energy drink all day. Let's just say that I drank a few of them and leave it at that.

The stunt show, which in recent years had been held out on the track, was performed in the parking lot with the fans right on top of the action. When you look at the photo album, you can see how close I was. What isn't shown in the pictures is that they were power sliding the bikes after each run right next to the fans. This was odd, but what really caught my attention was that no one seemed to care that a 600cc sportbike was coming to a stop 6 inches from them at each end of the coned area.

Vendor participation was lower than in years past, so we didn't go home with much more than T-shirts this year. I did spring for a new set of Michelin Power Pilots because the track price was almost half of what I was quoted back home. The next problem is how to get them on.

VIR - 2007 - Photo Album