...literally changed my life! I was still covering all forms of motorsports on a volunteer/freelance basis for what was then still a relatively young internet/www media audience. The moment I found out the race was on the NASCAR schedule (released on the internet before it hit newspapers or TV), I bought my plane tickets and made my hotel and rental car reservations. Good thing I did! When the airlines and hotels found out about it, prices climbed big time, and Las Vegas ran out of rental cars that weekend - if you waited or didn't know, you missed out and had to find another way to the track. You didn't want to take a cab that far and pay to sit in line on the freeway waiting to get close enough to walk, but a lot of folks did.

I had media credentials, a garage pass, a hot pit pass and an infield parking pass for that weekend. It was pretty cool being at such a new state-of-the-art racing facility, and being in Las Vegas too! But it was that race that I really realized that drag racing was where I wanted to be. The deadline media centers at most Cup tracks are in the infield behind pit row. You could camp out in the media center and watch the race on TV, or you could go up to the roof of the media center and actually watch the race live. That involved spinning around in a circle for about three hours to watch the race with a notepad in hand, then head back downstairs to do your writing. It quickly became boring, and spinning around in a circle for three hours will make you very dizzy!

The founder of FastNews Network was also at that race as a guest - he wasn't working, he was just there to watch. He was very aware of my work in drag racing. He had just secured funding for internet reporters to cover drag racing. It wasn't much at the time - enough to cover travel expenses. It was then and there that I was offered the job that I still have today. Summit Racing Equipment took a chance on a small group of internet geeks/drag racing fans and set up DragRaceCentral.com as our home.

Back then, it was only NHRA National events, so it meant maybe 5-6 event/year per reporter, all of the results exclusive to the Summit website. That soon expanded to Summit FastNews acknowledged reporting on NHRA and IHRA websites (when that happened, we actually started making more than just enough to cover travel expenses). Around 2001, our coverage expanded even further to NHRA Divisional events...then onto to IHRA divisional events and more Summit sponsored Sportsman racing events. I'm still what is considered "part-time", but last year I covered 26 events (all involved long weekends) in 7 months! Living out of a suitcase isn't for everyone, but I've got it down pretty good, and I love my job!

Now I gotta find out if anyone might like these chips from 2004. They were made for Jeff Arend and Connie Cowen, handed out in the pits at individual races. Some are just Jeff (Funny Car), some are just Connie (Pro Stock Bike) and some are both. All are unique to a specific event, and they were only available at that event. The scan shows the event locations and date sides of the chips. All of them have different sticker inlays on the reverse sides. Getting this many different chips wasn't easy, and I can't figure out what category they'd fit into on eBay...they are drag racing related but not diecasts or autographs, they aren't casino chips or a poker chip set, and a real wrench in the machinery is CMKX, the sponsor of these teams, was a publicly traded diamond mining company based in Las Vegas, headed by Urban somebody (I know his last name), who sold many millions of dollars worth of what quickly became micro-penny (worthless) stock in the company. The chips are worth more than the stock, but I'm not sure by how much!