Dudes and Dudettes!!!!!!! While at the PRO Winter Warmup this past weekend, we got our name on three Fuel Funny Cars and a Top Fuel Dragster! And not just any Funny Cars and Dragster. We’d love to convince you that we had some big plan and deal worked out to get some BangShift.com signage out there at the PRO Winter Warmup this past weekend, but the truth is we brought decals and figured if opportunity knocked we would drag his ass through the door like the Publisher’s Clearinghouse guy. He knocked.
On Friday evening, while Brian and I announced the LIVE broadcast, I made one of my normal impromptu decisions and announced a special deal for the folks watching the PRO Winter Warmup live here on BangShift to get some free decals for their race cars. Anyway, it turns into kind of a big thing and Brian and I are loving it. We pack up for the night after great racing action on Friday and hit the hotel. It’s at that point that we see Todd Myers who does PR for Kalitta Racing, and Jim Walczak who is McMillan’s PR dude, have emailed us while watching the LIVE broadcast and asked us to bring decals to the pits for their teams!
Yes, we were jumping up and down like 12 year old cheerleaders.
So, the next morning we hit the track, got all our crap set up to broadcast and headed toward the pits. Before even talking to Kalitta or McMillan we ran into DSR drivers Ron Capps and Matt Hagan. We consider both of these guys friends, and have had the opportunity to hang out with them a few times in the last few months so after listening to Matt tell a story about a cow of his being stuck in a tree, and Capps doing an interview, we told them about Kalitta and McMillan wanting to run our decals. They of course smiled and, when we asked if they could sneak a couple onto their cars, said they would see what they could do. Let us remind you that this is THE RON CAPPS, and MATT HAGAN 2011 NHRA FUNNY CAR CHAMPION!!!!!!
So we restrain ourselves, from being too excited, and head out to McMillan’s pit and Kalitta Racing. Terry takes the decals and says they’ll find a place for them with a smile on his face, and we leave with confidence that they will be somewhere that will make us laugh or jump up and down or both. When we get to Jeff Arend’s Kalitta Racing pit, we see that Jeff is cleaning up some stuff on the front of the fairly naked Funny Car body, and he just laughs when we tell him we were told to bring decals for the car. Like Capps and Hagan, Jeff knows us pretty well. We’ve interviewed him a few times, and because we LIVE broadcast the biggest Nostalgia Drag Racing events around, we have gotten to see him driving Dale Pulde’s War Eagle a bunch of times. Jeff is a cool dude. So he hands us some cleaner, a towel, and a hard card and suggests a spot on the rear quarter panel. Brian and I look at each other and just giggle. And so it is that with the level of precision you would expect from Brian and I, we applied BangShift decals to the Kalitta Racing BangShift.com DHL Funny Car. Okay, so it’s the DHL Funny Car, but it sure sounds good with BangShift in it.
After skipping to the rental car and continuing to laugh like little girls, we got back to work and started the LIVE broadcast of the 2012 PRO Winter Warmup when the first pair lined up at the starting line. When Arend, McMillan, Capps and Hagan came up for the first time I thought Brian and I were going to jump off the camera tower. It was awesome. And after battling it out all night long to be the first to 300 mph sporting a BangShift.com decal, the 1stMember in the BangShift.com 300 mph Club, is none other than our pal Ron Capps, driver of the Napa Auto Parts Don Schumacher Racing Dodge Charger NHRA Fuel Funny Car. With a pass of 299.35 mph, Capps was so close on his first attempt, but just couldn’t make it happen. Subsequent attempts by all 4 drivers had them smoking the tires and trying to find that sweet spot in their tune-ups. They got them all figured out later in the evening, and Capps came out first and ran 308 mph to be the first in the Club. The rest of our gang ran 300 with our decals, but Capps was the first and his 308 was the fastest. We couldn’t have been more thrilled about getting BangShift.com on to the most bad assed hot rods on the planet, and owe a huge thanks to Team Kalitta, Team McMillan, Don Schumacher Racing, Jeff Arend, Ron Capps, Terry McMillan, and Matt Hagan.
To these guys this was a fun gesture. To us it was the start of BangShift’s domination of the world, and we uuuuuhhhhhhhhhh I mean…. and it made us feel really good since Brian and I have worked to build BangShift.com from nothing into the hottest hot rod, racing, and gearhead destination on the web. What’s next? Stay tuned, you might be surprised.
BangShift sticker on Jeff Arend's nitro flopper!
Cad dorking out!
Pictures, or it never happened………………….
Too damn cool! I can only imagine the breathless excitement you guys felt the time you read that first email to when you were actually applying the stickers yourself…and then seeing them on multiple Pro cars running down the track…just too damn cool!!!
I gotta say, that’s pretty damned rad. Best NHRA PRO story that I can talk about here is when I took Michael Barton, Ray’s son, to DSR’s trailer to use valve grinding equipment so Mike could get a Hemi Challenge SS/AH car back up and running. Both parties had mad respect for one another, it was so cool to see. The PRO guys were in awe of the SS/AH dudes making just under 1000 HP and going rounds while (sometimes) fixing cars in the dirt.
Way cool guys !!
Keeping my fingers crossed that they are still there when the ESPN cameras start rolling.