WEDNESDAY, JULY 28, 2010 - I just wanted to give everyone a re-cap of Herd Racing and the many series in which our affiliated cars ran during the past week and offer little preview to our next APR SuperLeague boat race at Memphis this weekend.

Brett Rowe's debut in the CRA Super Late Model Series turned out pretty good on Monday.  Brett, seeing his first action since having his leg operation earlier this summer, qualified his Chevrolet 25th for the 27-car field and was able to bring home a 20th place finish in the race that featured more than 40 potential entries and had Cup stars like Kyle Busch, Ken Schrader and others in the field.  Brett said his leg swelled up, but a few days off his feet and he should be good to go.

The concert in which Brett participated on Sunday evening went even better.  Nearly 150 people were in attendnace to see and hear Beyond Measure, which features five adult musicians and nine young vocalists ranging in age from seven to their late teens.  It was a great concert and one young girl turned her life over to Christ after the event, while a few other teens sought out someone to talk with about their Salvation.  If your church is looking for some good contemporary Christian music by a bunch of youth who aren't ashamed of Jesus then you may want to contact Brett and have Beyond Measure sing at one of your events.  Their abilities are "beyond belief."

Over the weekend, Kevin Beahr recorded a Top-15 at Virginia Motor Speedway in his #75 Modified entry.  Chad Beahr took the week off from his #75 Sportsman entry while he does some engine work.  After a couple of finishes inside the Top 20, Saturday was Kevin's first time cracking the Top 15 this year so improvements are happening on that front each time he takes to the dirt at VMS.

Michael Gaier's debut in the U.S. Legend car series was rained out Tuesday night at Charlotte Motor Speedway.  He ran a qualifying race Tuesday afternoon, but the rains fell and the race was postponed.  He will hit the track again this Friday night in a U.S. Legends event at Caraway Speedway in North Carolina.  I have attached a photo of the #75 Legends entry which carries sponsorship from EyeEarn.com and TripleClicks.com.

As for boating, we tested Monday night and still had some bugs to work out when we put it back on the trailer.  The engine performance we are looking for and had at Pittsburgh just isn't there.  Sterling tore into the top end today and found some issues with the timing on the motor so we'll have to just wait and see what it has in store for us Friday afternoon when we hit the Mississippi for the first practice session at Memphis.  If it isn't back to where it needs to be we will pull the power head and rent one from another team for the Memphis race weekend.  We can't afford another points hit like we experienced at Marietta by not finishing the final.

Look for some Facebook updates as events unfold from Memphis at the Canadian-American Challenge Cup on Saturday and Sunday or watch the race on Fox Sports Net on Sunday afternoon at 1 p.m. eastern if you have that channel in your cable or dish package.

Dana Tomes

SATURDAY, JULY 24, 2010 - This coming week is building as a very busy one for everyone involved with Herd Racing and it's many programs. 

Things start out tonight as Chad Beahr and Kevin Beahr take to the track at Virginia Motor Speedway in their respective Sportsman and Modified race cars.  Chad, who recorded his first Top 10 of the season two races back, finished 11th in his last outing last Saturday night.  Kevin broke into the Top 20 last week with a 19th place run at Virginia Motor Speedway.

Tomorrow, Brett Rowe will be singing during the evening service at 26th Street Baptist Church in Huntington, WV, as the group "Beyond Measure" performs.  Youth from various area chuches are expected to attend as Brett, his two daughters, and other members of his youth group from Roach Baptist Church put on an hour-long show.

On Monday, Brett will be getting his racing legs back under him as he climbs into the cockpit of a #5 Chevrolet in the CRA Super Series late model division at Anderson Speedway in Indiana.  The race, the annual Redbud 300, usually draws a bunch of Cup and Nationwide drivers who have held over from their weekend at Indy to run at Anderson.  In addition to Brett, Ken Schrader and Mario Gosselin are entered in the 300-lap event.  Hopefully Brett's leg will be back to normal and he can get used to the heat because he is likely to be running in Montreal, Quebec again in the next few weeks in either a Herd Racing or Faith Motorsports Chevrolet Impala SS in NASCAR's Nationwide Series.  Brett's run in the CRA this week isn't a Herd Racing entry, but some seat time with another team as he continues to recover.

While Brett is tackling Anderson, the F-3 boat team will be on the Ohio River in Huntington shaking down the boat and motor in preparation for next weekend's Canadian-American Cup Challenge in Memphis.  We will run the boat a while hoping our motor woes from Marietta are behind us.  We will be leaving Thursday afternoon for the Memphis event and will likely blog a little more about the weekend before we leave.

Michael Gaier will tackle the asphalt mini oval at Charlotte Motor Speedway on Tuesday night as he debuts in the U.S. Legend Car series in a Herd Racing #75 EyeEarn.com Legend.  Michael's unofficial manager, JD Leedy, spent much of last week at the boat shop getting our new F-3 boat delivered before heading to Charlotte early this morning.  JD will hopefully return Wednesday with a good report from the Legends race and have a Hustler dolly trailer for our boat hitched behind his truck.  We need that trailer by Thursday afternoon and all indications are that Jeff and the guys at Hustler will have it ready for us to pick up Wednesday morning.

Lots happening this week.  I'll try to bring you up to speed on the boat test and some car racing results early in the week.

Dana Tomes

TUESDAY, JULY 20, 2010 - We have lots going on this week so I will use the blog space tonight to keep you up to date on what is happening in Herd Racing land.

First off, our Yeeeha Formula 3 boat was delivered today and it was much nicer than I had thought it would be.  I knew it was a pretty nice boat, but it is really in much better physical condition than I had hoped.  It will need a little body work, but overall, a coat of paint and some decals and it is ready for a motor and some testing.  We haven't torn into it yet, but the exterior and what I have seen of the interior so far look pretty promising.  It is about a foot shorter than our Pugh boat, right at 14 feet, which is the minimum length requirement for the SST-60 or F-3 class.

We also finalized the purchase of our first SST-120 or F-2 series boat today.  We will hopefully have it picked up next week.  It is an older boat that was ran under the Budweiser sponsorship back in early 2000s by Buck Thornton.  It was a very competitive boat in its day and was built by Seebold Racing in Missouri which is one of the pioneer families in F-2 powerboats.  It will take some work to get ready for the water, but the boat has the potential to be a front-runner in the 120 class with some work and a little sponsorship.

Our next step is finalizing sponsorship videos and presentations so we can begin selling the 2011 race seasons to potential sponsors.  Preliminary plans are for a two-boat team, racing in both the F-2 and F-3 series.  We still have another F-2 boat we hope to pick up this summer and then spend the winter months getting a primary boat and a backup boat ready for each class.

We hope to test our Pugh F-3 boat on Monday night on the Ohio River at Huntington.  It got swamped at Marietta and we blew a head gasket so we will get the motor up to temperature and run a few laps in calm water to make sure our power and acceleration are there before we head out to Memphis.

Speaking of Memphis, we hope to have a Hustler dolly trailer ready early next week so we can haul the boat in the hauler to Memphis.  Taking a second trailer to Marietta wasn't a big deal, but a 10-hour hike with two trailers just isn't in the budget.  Jeff at Hustler Trailers is working on the measurements and we should be able to pick it up next week in Knoxville, TN when we deliver our hood down for Gary Pugh to measure and build our new hood to help protect the motor from being swamped again.  We won't have the hood painted and on the boat for Memphis, but I suspect we will be sporting a new hood and motor cover for the Aurora race weekend in mid-August.

Crew Chief Jeramey is working on some sponsorship deals for next year and Eric and Bethany are working on hotel and catering sponsors for Memphis so things are progressing daily.  I'll post a shop photo one day when I can remember to take the camera to the shop and get a few shots of the new Yeeeha being worked on.

Also, Sam and Sherron Winer of the APR SuperLeague are visiting a potential site and meeting with possible promoters tomorrow in Huntington.  The hope is to bring SuperLeague racing back to the Ohio River at Huntington in 2011 like we used to enjoy back in the 90s.  I'll keep you posted on this as well as I learn more.

Dana Tomes

SATURDAY, JULY 17, 2010 - While much of our attention has been on boat racing the past couple of weeks, Herd Racing is still present at a handful of race tracks around the country on a regular basis with it's cars as well.

Brett Rowe continues to recover from his leg surgery and should be ready to buckle back in a Nationwide Series car in a month or so.  While our Nationwide cars have been garaged for the most part this year due to funding and Brett's injury, we were able to run the #75 at New Hampshire last month.

We had hopes of running the car tonight at Gateway, but last week the Faith Motorsports program worked a deal to put Morgan Shepherd in a Richard Childress car in the Nationwide Series.  That pulled Johnny Chapman from the #75 to fill Morgan's seat in the Racing With Jesus #89 Chevrolet.  Hopefully, Brett can hop in the seat of the #75 in a month or so.  We may run the Herd car at Montreal in August where we saw of 21st place run last year.  I'll keep you updated on that as we see what happens with Morgan in the #21 and Johnny in the #89.  The worst thing (I can speak from experience on this one) is trying to do too much with too little.  Basically the Faith bunch is fielding the #21 and #89 right now so adding a Faith/Herd #75 may be more than we have the manpower to do right now.

In other Herd entries, Michael Gaier will run an EyeEarn.com Herd Racing partnership entry in the U.S. Legends Car Series later this month at Charlotte Motor Speedway.  Michael has ran the #75 twice this year in the PASS Super Late Model Series, but is cutting back to the Legends Series due to the money it costs to field a late model each week.

Meanwhile, Chad and Kevin Beahr continue their full season run at Virginia Motor Speedway in the Sportsman and Modified classes, both bearing the #75.

Speaking of sponsorship, Herd Racing was mentioned today in an article it the Charleston, S.C. newspaper.  A reporter there covers the NASCAR business angle and talked to many of the smaller teams about Danica Patrick and her impact on sponsorship.  You can find the article here: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-42294-NASCAR-Business-Examiner~y2010m7d17-Is-media-coverage-of-Danica-Patrick-hurting-the-small-NASCAR-Nationwide-teams-and-their-sponsors.

The sponsorship hunt right now is the worst that I have ever seen it.  Full time teams in NASCAR are just hanging on by a thread and even the smaller racing series, from cars to trucks to boats, are feeling the pinch.  I really think that even though the economy is starting to turn a little for the good, this year and even next year will be horrible for motorsports.  Remember, many of these companies who sponsor have multi-year deals they can't just walk away from.  Just think how many race cars would have a blank hood if contracts weren't holding some of these sponsors in place.  Even Lowe's Motor Speedway has returned to Charlotte Motor Speedway.  The reigning four-time Sprint Cup champion (Lowe's) is even feeling the economic pinch.

I think next year will be a year that just about every form of racing gets humbled because the funding to run like they have in the past couple decades just won't be there.  Grass roots racing will be back, sooner than many of us may think.

Dana Tomes

TUESDAY, JULY 13, 2010 - The disappointment of underperforming at Marietta is still pretty evident to us, but while we hoped to make solid progress in Week 2 of the SuperLeague tour we didn't come home without some gains.

First off, we are working with Gary Pugh, the designer and builder of many boats, including portions of our boat, to get a new rear hood designed and produced over the next couple of weeks.  Hopefully we will have this constructed, painted and on the the boat before we go to Memphis at the end of the month.

When we looked back, it was a simple hood that could have deflected the water off of our motor cover that could have resulted in a much different outcome on Saturday and Sunday in Marietta.  I stuck the inside picklefork exiting Turn 4 during a heat race and burried up the sponson tip in the water which threw a big burst of water over the boat and into the motor cover.   The motor immediately stalled which ended our day three laps short in the final heat race.  In fact, that water ended pretty much our whole weekend.

The water can be traced right up the ladder to our poor Sunday performance.  Once the water entered the motor cover and thrust right into the carberator openings it was pushed into the cylinder of the motor where air should have been pushed.  The water caused the cylinder to not fire and most likely the cold water and action of compression within the cylinder caused the weakest link to break.  That being the head gasket.

We thought that because the motor started later on after we dried it out that we would be OK, but our Sunday morning test showed otherwise.  We traced everything down and found a broken probe on the top coil, but an earlier test showed we had fire on all three cylinders so I really doubt that coil was our biggest problem now that we look back on it.  The probe was still delivering fire, it was just probably limiting our performance some, but likely wasn't the biggest issue we had going.

It was the head gasket that was limiting our RPMs, but being pressed by time and thinking the coil problem would fix it, we went back out for the final without checking it.  Lesson learned.  If we ever get swamped again, which I hope the hood addition will prevent, we will pull the head before going back out just to make sure.  Our inexperience with this type of motor bit us.  A rookie mistake for a rookie pilot and crew that we will learn from.

Anyway, hopefully that hood will solve this from happening again and we have ordered a new engine mount and cowling which will hopefully help keep the moisture out a little better as well.

Also, our Yeeeha Formula 3 boat should be ready this week.  We will be picking it up and bringing it to the shop to get started on rigging it up and getting it ready for paint.  We won't have it ready for Memphis as we had hoped to, but we will be running it before the end of the season somewhere to see how it does.  We are still looking for a motor for it, but if we need to, we can pull the motor off of the Pugh boat to test the Yeeeha for one weekend somewhere.  Our goal is to have two fully rigged and functional boats on the hauler so if we get into something again like we did at Marietta we could just switch out power heads and continue on knowing that we have a good motor on the boat.

Honestly, I really like the Pugh boat and at this point I think we can get it performing pretty well by season's end.  We were running 5th place times in practice on Saturday morning but fell to 9th in qualifying and both heat races.  I suspect that maybe the coil probe had us a little down on power when we were under load because we just couldn't figure out why we couldn't run the times in qualifying and on the race course that we were running in practice.

For your viewing enjoyment I have attached a photo of Herd Racing's #75 Jesus Boat getting towed in after we swamped the motor Saturday in Marietta.  Check out some other photos we are beginning to upload on the photo gallery.  We should have more downloaded off of the cameras this weekend and posted in the gallery.

Dana Tomes

SUNDAY, JULY 11, 2010 - Well it's pushing midnight on Sunday night and we just got in from the APR SuperLeague Regional Championships in Marietta, OH where we experienced exactly the opposite racing luck that we enjoyed last weekend in Pittsburgh.

At the North American Championships last weekend things just kept getting better and better as the weekend went on.  At Marietta this weekend we endured the opposite.

The first practice session on Saturday went great.  We improved our lap times by about 2.5 seconds during the course of the 45-minute session, running times that were in the Top 5 of the F-3 boats which were competing.  We made some setup changes for the qualifying runs and heat races and the luck quickly turned sour.

In single boat qualifying we turn the 9th quickest time, about a second slower than our practice times.  In both heat races the boat just didn't handle the way it did in practice and the forward bite just wasn't there.  You can tell that in boat racing by the height of the rooster tail the boat shoots from the prop and by the angle that the boat rides on the water.  We needed more lift on the nose to get more of the boat up out of the water and we needed more depth on the prop to get more forward thrust which would help elevate the boat.

After we swamped the motor coming out of Turn 4 late in the second qualifier we changed the setup, lowered the engine and thought our performnace on Sunday would show better results.  The problem was that our swamping of the motor led to problem after problem in the motor department including a blown coil and a blown head gasket.  We went out for testing on Sunday morning and were down a cylinder.  We replaced the coil and thought that would fix the problem thanks to some troubleshooting by F2 champion Mark Jakob.  We went out to start the final and could tell all three cylinders were hitting, but we weren't able to get the RPMs up.  That ended our day early and resulted in a motor teardown to see what was happening.  We suspected a blown head gasket or a bad piston, but the inside of the Evinrude looked great except for a big blowout between the first and second cylinder on the head gasket.  A big thanks to boat builder Gary Pugh who oversaw the engine teardown for us Sunday afternoon!

But our off the track events went great all weekend long.  Greg and Krystal and their kids were on vacation this week and didn't make the race, but my Tonya and Hannah went to Marietta, along with Eric's Bethany, Allison and Emily so we had some help at the trailer with our outreach program.  Hopefully Greg and Krystal will be back with us at Memphis and Jeramey's wife, Melissa, and son Spencer are hoping to come along as well.

Hannah and Allison made sure every passing kid got a Jesus Fish necklace and Bethany and Tonya talked to people about the team and our mission while handing out about 100 "We are Marshall" DVDs and some Christian outdoors videos.  Everyone seemed to love the free movies so we owe a thanks to Marshall University for helping us spread the word of the university to those in and around Marietta.

We spent dinner Saturday night at a downtown Marietta restaurant with Dan Bunting and his Monster Energy Drink crew, as well as fellow F-3 pilot Toby Hood and his family.  Thanks to Dan and Britt for inviting all of us out to dinner.

I'll try to blog a few times this week, but honestly, I have to work about a hundred hours this coming week to have any hopes of getting caught up at the office anytime soon.

We had a nice interview on a local NBC station which you can see on our Facebook page by clicking on the Facebook icon on the front page of the website.  And, as you can see from the picture with today's blog, I was honored to have my photo taken with the Queen and Supreme of the Marietta Riverfront Roar.  Normally Tonya wouldn't be real pleased if I posed for photos with the local beauty queens, but since these two beauties were about 5 years old I guess she'll let me slide.

Dana Tomes

THURSDAY, JULY 8, 2010 - It doesn't seem like you are as ever as prepared as you wish you could be.  That's our situation again this week as we head off for Race #2 in the APR SuperLeague powerboat season.  We will be leaving tomorrow around noon for the 95-mile trek to Marietta, Ohio, site of the APBA Regional Championships.

Marietta is the closest race in the series to our shop, just a two-hour drive up the Ohio River.  I had hoped to switch over to the dolly trailer this week and leave the pickup truck behind, but tonight as we finished loading the hauler and went to set the boat over on the dolly trailer we saw that we had some balance issues that we need to address.  So, the hauler is already loaded, washed and ready to go and now we find out the trailer we need to load the boat into the hauler won't work.  You guessed it.  This week we are taking the hauler, and a pickup truck to pull the boat.  Luckily it is just a skip to Marietta and we can get the dolly trailer lined out for the next race.

Otherwise, things are progressing.  We made some improvements this week with the breathing air system, did some work on the radio cables in the cockpit, touched up some paint issues from last weekend, fixed a lot of the technical things that were pointed out about our boat from last week and we got our blog set up to automatically post to our new Facebook page so those of you who Facebook don't have to check both places to find our updates.

We hope to be able to upload some photos, scanner traffic and video this weekend from Marietta so stay tuned as the weekend progresses.

Dana Tomes

TUESDAY, JULY 7, 2010 - We spent today getting ready for the APBA's Regional Championships which are coming up this weekend in Marietta, Ohio.  We will be leaving Friday morning to arrive for afternoon inspection and then two days of racing on the Ohio River.

We spent some time blowing the dust off of the old #75 ARCA/Nationwide hauler tonight.  It hasn't been moved since April's Nationwide race at Nashville but it looked like it had been sitting for years as it had spider webs and bugs everywhere.  Jeramey finished wiring up all of the LED marker lights and I went to the Freightliner dealer today to pick up the tractor from it's clutch replacement.  I will hook the rig up and pull it outside for some cleaning tomorrow night after church and we will begin the load on Thursday night.

We still have a little work to do on the dolly trailer before we switch the boat over to it, but if everyone can come out Thursday night we should have the rig loaded and ready to pull out Friday morning.  It will be nice at Marietta to be able to work out of the trailer where we can have an air conditioned place to sit, eat and talk.  The arrangements at Pittsburgh weren't the best as the dock was about a mile away from the pits and you had to leave all of your equipment at the pits and just take the boat and a pickup truck to the river.  Everyone managed, but few were real happy about the setup.  Everyone I have talked to says Marietta is one of the best stops on the tour.  They say the whole city shuts down for the races and the haulers park in the city streets which are closed off for the weekend.

If you want to learn more about the Marietta Riverfront Roar you can access their website at  http://www.mariettariverfrontroar.org/.  Rumor has it that we will have a lot more boats entered this week because the event is very fan friendly and the drivers seem to love it.

We aren't really making any changes to the boat for this week, with the exception of some changes in the cockpit.  We are adding some foam in some places to help hold me in place a little better and keep my legs from bouncing around so much.  There was a bolt on the left side of the cockpit that just wore a quarter-sized hole in my knee last week.  This week we are adding some rubber and knee pads.  I really think that if I can get more comfortable in the boat I can get a lot more speed out of it as I continue to get the feel for the boat.

If you want to listen to the scanner traffic from last week's final in Pittsburgh you can find it on YouTube or you can click on the attached link to listen http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HQ8eWWIqtI.  The radio traffic sounds a lot like a NASCAR race as each boat has at least one spotter and sometimes two.  We had crew chief Jeramey Wentz spotting and fellow F-3 pilot Sammy Miller as an adviser helping Jeramey and me throughout the weekend.

I'll try to get you some more information before we pull out Friday morning.

Dana Tomes

SATURDAY, JULY 3, 2010 - What an awesome day with blessing after blessing from the Lord.  Herd Racing's "Jesus boat" as the fans have named it, enjoyed a wonderful day of racing at the American Power Boat Association's North American Championship in Pittsburgh.

We started the day with a lengthy practice session that I have to admit I was very, very jittery about.  I am not usually someone who gets nervous or anxious about much, but my stomach was twisted all morning and I had to chew a bunch of Pepto tablets to try to get it under control.  I had no idea what to expect when we lauched that boat this morning, but after about 10 laps on that course the boat just kept feeling better and better after every lap.

We started the afternoon qualifying session by qualifying 8th for the first qualifier heat race.  We finished 8th in the first heat race and then they inverted the field and we pulled off a 6th place run in the second heat race.  We were all very, very happy with the improvements in our performance as the day wore on.  To be honest, I expected to be dog last in everything today, but we saw pretty early in the afternoon that we could compete.  Had our boat had someone driving it who knew what they heck they were doing then the Jesus boat could have been well up in the Top 5 in that final race.  I left a bunch of speed out there, which is great, because I know next week at the Regional Championships in Marietta, OH that we will have much smoother water and I can push the boat a lot harder as I continue to get the feel for it!

The combination of the qualifying laps and the two heat races allowed us to qualify for and start 10th in the 10-boat North American Championship final Sunday evening.  We were not only very happy to be racing in the final, but we were able to pull off a sixth place finish in one of the biggest races on the circuit.  Jeramey, Eric and Greg were just hopping as we kept getting better and better.

We owe a huge "thank you" to the Tunnel Vision Racing team.  Mark and Tammy Jakob, Dan Bunting and all of their crews helped us all day with pointers, fuel mixtures, propeller choices and just about everything.  Sammy Miller, a Tunnel Vision pilot who usually runs the #7 boat didn't run this weekend and he helped as our spotter.  He was awesome!  So calm on the radio and so much encouragement.  Thanks Sammy.  You're the man!

Well, it's real late and we're all beat, but check out the Facebook page later tonight or early morning hours.  There is a link to it in yesterday's blog.  Jeramey and Eric are nite owls and they are working up some more photo slides and audio and video posts for YouTube and Facebook.  They posted a short video early this morning which was an intro for today's races. 

We will be watching and learning from the Tunnel Vision crew tomorrow during the F-2 events and will be travelling home tomorrow night.  I will try to blog some more updates and get the photo gallery going Monday night.

It was also cool that Fox Sports chose our boat as one of four in the finals to carry in-boat cameras.  We had two Fox cameras on the boat, as well as our own camera so the SuperLeague Media broadcasts that will air many times on Fox Sport affilates the next several months should have some footage from our boat.

Dana Tomes

FRIDAY, JULY 2, 2010 - We arrived safely in Pittsburgh this afternoon and started our day with credentials and then technical and safety inspections.  Surprisingly, the whole process was much like it is in NASCAR as the inspectors go over everything from the hull construction to helmet specifications to motor specifications.  It took about two hours to get the approval sticker to race, but it seemed like some of the other boats encountered many more issues than we did.  We have some things we need to change before hitting the water tomorrow, but there isn't anything that will keep us from racing tomorrow.

We spent the evening in downtown Pittsburgh near the River's Casino as our boat was one of four which was invited to participate in the Powerboat Village display on the waterfront on the North Shore.  There were three F-3 boats, our's, last year's champion Brent Dillard's #80 boat and Carole Reno's #16 boat.  Carole's husband, Jeff Reno, had his #34 F-2 boat on display as well.  We gave a few Jesus Fish necklaces to some kids who were excited about the boats, and a handful of We are Marshall DVDs to some people who asked about the team and it's relationship with Marshall.

The technical guys of the crew, Jeramey Wentz and Eric Himes, have set up a Herd Racing Facebook page if you want to follow what is going on there.  It can accessed by clicking on the badge below.  There will be some video, audio and still photos on the Facebook page as the weekend progresses so you can check there for updates.

I will try to blog something tomorrow and put a story up on the front page letting you know how our day of qualifying and racing goes.

Dana Tomes

Herd Racing

Promote Your Page Too

THURSDAY, JULY 1, 2010 - All that remains is adjusting the seat belts, testing the radios and loading the truck.  Should have that done pretty early tonight and have a good night's rest before heading off to the APR SuperLeague season opener this weekend in Pittsburgh.

Here is a photo of the boat from Thursday afternoon as we pulled it out of the shop for a washing.  The boat will carry sponsorship on the sponsons from Marshall University, Mother Mouse Books, DuVita and ECO-FIRST, while our main nameplate on the hood will bear a large lime and black Jesus fish.

Smaller decals on the boat include C2C Racing Designs, which helped us with the paint scheme ideas, Mechanix Wear gloves, Wix Filters, Holley fuel pumps, Security Race Products, Champion spark plugs, Fellowship of Christian Athletes, RJS Race Gear and AutoMeter guages, as well as SuperLeague contingency sponsors including VP Racing Fuels, Royal Purple two cycle oils, Lifeline Safety Products and Bald Spot Sports.

I am sure I am a little biased in my opinion, but I think the boat turned out very nicely and will look pretty cool in the sunshine on the Allegheny River beginning Saturday morning.  The league is noted for having a bunch of lively colored boats so I am eager to see some of the other colors and paint schemes.

Our webmaster got a photo gallery up for the Pittsburgh event so we will begin posting photos to it tomorrow night of inspections and will continue Saturday and Sunday nights with race photos.  You can click on photos on the main website homepage to see the galleries.

We may post a YouTube link or something where you can see some video or hear some driver/crew audio, but we'll have to see what the league will allow once we get set up on Saturday morning.

Hopefully I'll be blogging again Friday or Saturday night with some updates for you.

Dana Tomes

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 30, 2010 - In about 36 hours we will be on our way to Pittsburgh to compete in the APBA's North American Championship events on the Allegheny River.  All that remains is some general cleaning, packing and loading of the truck.

The boat team guys will spend tomorrow evening in the shop finishing up a few loose ends.  The engine cover needs painted, the boat trailer cleaned and the radios tested.  Other than that, we are pretty much ready to go.

I will try to take a photo of the boat tomorrow and post it on the blog before we leave Friday morning so you can see the finished product.  We will be going through technical inspection on Friday so hopefully I can update you Friday night as to how that went and maybe post a photo.

Hopefully we will have a Pittsburgh photo gallery set up this weekend so you can see some photos from Friday, Saturday and Sunday's action.

Things are progressing nicely.  Got the seat mounted last night and finished up the radio wiring and breathing air system.  Finished up the decals today and worked on touching up a few nicks and such in the paint.

Not sure what to expect, but I can say regardless of our performance that our uniforms, crew and boat will look first class this weekend!  Can't wait to share the photos with you later this weekend.

Dana Tomes

MONDAY, JUNE 28, 2010 - If you wondered where I have been for the past 10 days or so the answer is Myrtle Beach.  Believe it or not this was my first trip to the Grand Strand.  I am probably the only West Virginian over the age of three who had not been to Myrtle for a summer vacation.  We had a great eight-day stay at Myrtle Beach State Park in the camper and spent every day riding the waves, digging in the sand, riding bikes, flying kites and doing absolutely nothing anywhere close to anything that could be considered work related.

But, while I was gone things continued full steam ahead on the Herd Racing front.  Let's see.  Where should we start.  How about an update on Brett's recovery.

I talked to Brett today and he is doing well.  He goes for an ultrasound later this week to make sure the artery exterior wall is healing over well, but from all indications things are progressing as expected.  Hopefully, we will see Brett back behind the wheel of a Nationwide car in a few months.

Speaking of Nationwide racing, Johnny Chapman pulled the sheet off of the #75 this past weekend at New Hampshire Motor Speedway as he qualified 39th and finished 40th in the Nationwide Series race at the Magic Mile.  While the car was mid-pack in both practice sessions the team almost made a huge error in qualifying.  Both Johnny and Morgan qualified on scuffed tires as has been the norm at New Hampshire for years.  The rest of the field ran stickers which resulted in both the 89 and 75 starting toward the back of the field.   We will most likely enter Johnny again in the #75 at Gateway International Raceway in three weeks but we'll just have to see how the race fields stack up the next couple weeks.

Also, Michael Gaier qualifed his #75 Ford Fusion late model in the 12th spot of a 31-car field Saturday at Orange County Speedway in North Carolina.  Michael had a rear end failure and finished 23rd, but he is showing great progress in just his second race behind the wheel in the past couple years.  Look for more news about his next venture to the track on his site www.michaelgaier.com and I will update here as the time grows nearer.

And, Chad Beahr brought home a Top 10 at Virginia Motor Speedway Saturday night finishing 10th in the 25-lap feature in the Sportsman Class there.  His nephew, Kevin Beahr, finished 21st in the Modified Series race at Virginia Motor Speedway.

And lastly tonight, the boat is in paint and lettered up for Pittsburgh!  We will go through inspection for the North American Championship events on Friday and will qualify, run two heat races and run the NAC final Saturday (assuming we qualify for the field) on the Allegheny River in downtown Pittsburgh.  We worked until 10 tonight on the boat (a photo of it is atop tonight's blog) and will work again tomorrow night and Thursday night before heading off for PA.  In case you wondered, Wednesday is church night!

I am sure our chief engineer Eric Himes will capture some video, still photos and some crew audio this weekend in Pittsburgh so we hope to have some fun media for you to look at and listen to next week.

I'll be back a couple times this week with updates as we prepare for our first Formula 3 event!

Dana Tomes

MONDAY, JUNE 14, 2010 - Good news to report tonight.  Brett Rowe had the artery in his leg repaired Friday and went home from the hospital Sunday afternoon with a good report.  Apparently, the doctors feel much better this time around about the surgery and told Brett that they feel like they completely removed the cyst from within his leg artery and were able to repair the wall of the artery where the cyst was growing.  All that is excellent news!

With racing on the back burner for now, Brett will have all the time he needs to heal up and get ready for racing later this fall.  Last time around we had Brett in the race shop preparing for Daytona the week after his surgery and had him in the car in Florida within a month.  This time he is going to take all the time needed to make sure he isn't rushed into action.

Keep Brett in your prayers as he recovers.  Anytime you get cut on it is a major deal and having the same thing done twice in the span of six months makes it doubly bad.  The incision runs behind the knee so any bending or flexing creates some pretty harsh pains which I am sure he will have to endure for quite a few weeks as his range of motion slowly comes back.

In other news, we are off to Illinois to pick up the primary boat for Pittsburgh tomorrow.  The guys there ran the boat over the weekend and again today in the Kankakee River and report that it is about ready for paint and some racing.  Mark Jakob, the owner of the boat and overseer of the rebuild effort on it, says he still has a few bugs to work out in the ignition and fuel system, but he is confident it will be ready to ship by tomorrow.

Once we get it back home it is to the paint booth on Thursday or Friday to begin sanding and primer.  We are working with Coast 2 Coast Racing Designs for our paint scheme so I expect something pretty cool when we get to the Allegheny River on July 2!  Hopefully we will have it in paint by the middle of next week and then have a week to get all of the safety stuff and lettering done before heading out.

We continued in the shop tonight getting the dolly trailer for the boat finished up and installed some more of the LED marker lights on the main hauler.  We are slowly going over the hauler making improvements before we go to each race so it looks a little better each time we take it out.

I hope to get you some photos of the boat in progress sometime late this week.  Things are starting to come together.

Dana Tomes

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 9, 2010 - For those of you who would like to learn a little more about Herd development driver Michael Gaier there is a nice feature interview posted on Weekend Warriors TV on the web.  Michael participated in his first super late model race of the season last weekend at ACE Speedway in North Carolina and the Weekend Warriors television team spent quite a bit of time talking to him and following his progress.

If you want to see the 10-minute clip you can view it by clicking here http://weekendwarriorstv.com/home/2010/06/08/episode-14/.  There also is a photo gallery with 50 or so photos of the race weekend on his website, www.michaelgaier.com.

Michael is planning to be back at the track on June 26 at Orange County Speedway in another PASS Super Late Model race with support from EyeEarn.com.

Unless bad luck or bad weather strikes, Chad and Kevin Beahr will have their Sportsman and Modified rides back on the dirt at Virginia Motor Speedway this weekend as well.

In other news, our Nationwide Series car chief Morris Van Vleet has been named the crew chief of a new part time Nationwide Series team that will debut at Daytona in July.  Morris has been serving as a crew chief on a Camping World Truck Series program for the past month or so since we idled our Nationwide program after Nashville in April.  Quality people find quality positions and I congratulate Morris on a job well done.  I am sure if Brett gets back his health later this year and we go back to the track in the Nationwide Series in the #75 that we can hopefully borrow Morris for a race or two.

Also, we got word from the boat builders today that our primary tunnel boat will be ready to be picked up on June 15.  That cuts it real close for us to get it prepped, painted, lettered and the final touches done by the time we pull out on July 2, especially when I have an 8-day Myrtle Beach trip right in the middle of that two-week window.  That leaves about a week to get it done, but we'll make it.  Thankfully, Mark Jakob of Tunnel Vision Racing is going to break the motor in for us, adjust all of the cabling and have it pretty much ready for us to install our technical stuff and do the paint work.

We also closed the deal on our second boat this week.  We have purchased a Yeeeha brand SST60/F3 tunnel boat that formerly ran on another racing circuit in the southwest.  It is a real nice boat that I think with a little time and effort can be as good or better than our primary piece.  We will get on it after the second race of the year and hopefully try it out on the Mississippi at the Memphis race on August 1.  After that weekend we can compare notes and see which one we want to use for the final three-race stretch of our rookie season.

Things are progressing.  J.D. Leedy is creating small baseball-type cards for our boat crew, most of the uniform situation has been taken care of, and most of our equipment has been received.  All we are waiting on at this point is the breathing air system for the boat and the capsule floatation suit.

I hope to begin announcing partnerships and sponsors in the next week or so.  Check back soon!

Dana Tomes

SUNDAY, JUNE 6, 2010 - Herd Racing development driver Michael Gaier worked months preparing for his first start of the 2010 PASS Super Late Model Series on Friday night only to have his night of racing ended just five laps into the featured 150-lap event.  Gaier, despite have no practice or test time, qualified his #75 Ford into the 14th starting spot, but got pinched from above and behind early in the race, resulting in damage to the car which could not be repaired at the track.  Here is a photo of the EyeEarn.com Ford that Michael drove.  He has plans to be back on the track in about three weeks, hopefully with continued support from EyeEarn and its TripleClicks.com parent company.

In other driver news, Brett Rowe is facing a second surgery to the artery in his leg.  I talked with him late last week and he said the procedure is likely to take place late this coming week in Huntington.  It will be a repeat of the same procedure he had done in early January where a cyst was removed from the interior of his leg artery which is blocking good blood flow to his lower leg.  Let's pray that everything will go well and Brett will make a full recovery.  Brett plans to take it easy after this one and let the wound heal.  Last time he was back in the shop the following week and at Daytona within 30 days of having surgery.  This time we will leave him parked until we are sure he is healed up.

On to boating.  The debut of the Herd Racing splash into powerboat racing is now just a month away!  Things are progressing.  During shop night tomorrow night we will likely finish up the dolly trailer used to put the boat in and out of the water, and finish up some things on the hauler.  The Freightliner tractor is back in the shop with those mysterious clutch issues again, so this time the whole clutch system is being replaced.  It will be costly, but at least we will know that everything in the system is new and we certainly hope it will end the clutch problem forever.

Our in-boat camera system came this past week and chief engineer Eric Himes is learning the in's and out's of it.  We hope to get some good footage from Pittsburgh to show you.  Eric is pretty good at putting together those short 2-3 minute highlight reels so we hope to have something to post for you the week after the first race.  We also hope to get the primary boat in the shop this week.  The last estimate was that it would be ready to be picked up from the rebuilder sometime late this week.  We also are eyeing a second boat we have come across which may be even better than the one we planned to use as a primary boat.  We'll see how fundraising goes, but we could be upgrading our boat situation as early as the third race of the season.  I think we will use the Pittman/Pugh for at least the first two races and then see how it performs.  If it does well then the second one we have found can be readied as a backup and probably ran one weekend somewhere along the way this year just to see how it does.  That will give us some good data to help determine what to do over the winter months in preparation for 2011 when the rookie restrictions are lifted and we can race with the pack.  The only problem we have with this scenario is that I'm not going to know if the first boat drives worth a hoot until I drive the second boat because I have absolutely nothing to use as a baseline.  It could handle and perform terribly and I wouldn't know the difference.  I will just have to compare the two and see which one I can make go the fastest.  Hopefully by the third or fourth week we will start to show some promise.

We will get some in-progress photos of the primary boat as soon as it arrives and we begin the paint work.  Stay tuned!

Dana Tomes

TUESDAY, JUNE 1, 2010 - I hope everyone had a safe and happy Memorial Day holiday weekend.  Wasn't it great to get an extra day off work so you could do what you wanted to do, instead of what you had to do!  I spent my Monday morning mowing our little cemetery here on the homefront so if anyone stopped by it would look nice, and I spent some time in the evening getting the bunk supports ready to weld on the new boat dolly trailer.  It may not sound like much fun to you, but my Memorial Day went exactly as planned!

Let's start off tonight by welcoming aboard our Herd Racing Formula 3 boat crew who will be focusing on that portion of our race program this summer.

In boating there isn't a need for more than three people in addition to the driver on the official crew, but there will be several more going each week to help with the support activities like food, drinks and that sort of thing.  As you know, food is probably my single most important element in making a race weekend successful.  Last place on a full stomach feels much better to me than a Top 5 accompanied by a headache and a growling pit.  A chopped steak and baked potato makes any day a good one.

As for the official crew, Jeramey Wentz of Chesapeake, OH has been tabbed as our crew chief for the boat program.  Jeramey is a native of Webster Springs, WV but has lived in the Huntington, WV area for most of his adult life.  Jeramey's background working with people and serving in management roles professionally should make this a perfect fit for him.  Jeramey will take care of running the race program on race weekends and will be responsible for meeting with league officials, dealing with league inspectors, steadying the boat for launch and serving as the spotter on the radio.

Longtime Herd crew member Greg Smith of Salt Rock, WV will serve as the boat chief for the program.  Similar to a car chief's role in auto racing, Greg will oversee the boat, engine, hull, fuel, batteries, trim pumps, and general readiness of the craft each week, as well as launch and remove the boat from the water for practice sessions, qualifying and the races.  I have known Greg for several years now as he was one of the contractors who built my family's home so I know he is a pretty good carpenter.  I hope he brings his hammer and nails to the track because I am confident I can provide him with a banged up wooden boat just about every weekend.

And, Eric Himes of Chesapeake, OH will serve as our chief engineer.  Eric, who is a native of Princeton, WV, and works professionally in the IT department at Marshall University, will oversee the technology side of Herd Racing's boat program.  Eric will oversee the in-boat camera, videotaping of the races, still photographs at the races, the two-way radio system and that sort of thing.

There is a profile of each of the three new crew members in the "Have You Herd" section on the front page of the website if you want to learn a little more about the crew or see their photographs.  I will warn you up front, good looks isn't their strong suit, so we hope a neat uniform will work wonders.

Throw in a handful of wives and kids and we should have a pretty fun weekend each time we go to the water.  Hope you can join us sometime this summer!

In other news, Michael Gaier will practicing tomorrow at Greenville-Pickens Speedway in South Carolina to get ready for his PASS Late Model Series debut on Friday night in North Carolina.  You can follow the action at www.michaelgaier.com or I will update you here on our website over the weekend as to how his race goes.

And lastly tonight, Chad and Kevin Beahr took to the dirt Saturday night at Bill Sawyer's Virginia Motor Speedway in Jamaica, VA.  Chad finished 14th in the Sportsman class feature race while Kevin brought home his modified entry in 21st place in the feature event.

More news later this week.

Dana Tomes

FRIDAY, MAY 28, 2010 - I want to wish everyone a happy Memorial Day weekend.  The first long weekend of summer is here and I hope all of you celebrate it safely.  My plans include building the dolly trailer to haul the F3 boat on in the hauler.

If you happen to get bored during the weekend and want some recreational web-watching then here is the link to watch a promotional video clip of this year's upcoming North American Powerboat Championships July 3 and 4 in Pittsburgh.  You can click on the following link to watch the clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYUlOBKfvWc&feature=player_embedded.

If you are interested in watching one of last year's Formula 3 qualifying races you can view the clip for that race at the following link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpyexpe_cGA&NR=1.  There are a lot of SuperLeague racing action from 2008 and 2009 that people have posted to YouTube.  This year's races will again be televised by Fox Sports Net regional sports television.

I will fill you in early next week on some Herd Racing results as Chad and Kevin Beahr race this weekend in Virginia and Michael Gaier is racing next weekend in North Carolina.

Have a great weekend.

Dana Tomes

THURSDAY, MAY 27, 2010 - Preparations for our power boat debut is continuing.  Here is a photo of the first boat we are purchasing and the one we will be using as our primary boat in 2010.  It was driven previously by Mark Jakob in the F3 class where it carried the #77.  Of course, when you next see the boat it will bear the #75 and will sport a new paint scheme to reflect Herd Racing's sponsors and supporters.  Mark has had the boat redecked and the engine is currently in the shop for a rebuild.  Once it arrives here in our shop we will do the paint, install the radio, breathing air system, apply the decals and retrofit the trailer to fit into our NASCAR-style hauler.

It will be a push to get everything ready before heading off the Pittsburgh on July 2, especially since we are still a week or more away from getting the boat and then I have a four-day camping trip and a weeklong beach trip to throw in there before the race weekend.  That won't leave a lot of time to get the boat ready, but like we always do in NASCAR, we can pull a few long nights to get it squared away.  I guess I can always practice holding my breath underwater at the beach so it won't be like I am just taking a week off and not doing anything to get ready.

I also might emphasize that you should not expect great things from the #75 entry for a while as I have almost as much time in the cockpit of the space shuttle as I do in an F3 tunnel boat.  Come to think about it, I have the exact same amount of time so in both so I guess if I can drive this boat then becoming an astronaut may be next on my long list of goofy stuff to try before old age.  In addition, the ABPA rules for rookies make it almost impossible to do anything but be an "also ran" the first season.  The rookie boats are held at the starting gate two seconds after the rest of the boats take off so that our lack of experience doesn't result in the "big one" at Talladega as the boats enter Turn 1.  Rookies are also prohibited from passing on the inside and must always give the inside lane to the faster boats.  So, you can see by getting a two second head start and getting rights to the shortest way around the track that the senior boats will have a much bigger advantage.  I guess I will just wait for them to come back around and act like I'm in the lead.  OK, we'll just do the best we can and hope for steady improvement each weekend.  You would think a guy with my vast knowledge of boat racing . .  or piloting, as they call it . .  they would offer me the two second head start just to make things interesting in the first turn.

In other related news, we are working on getting our hotel and catering sponsors sorted out this week for the Pittsburgh and Marietta races and I am continuing to get our supplies gathered up.  I ordered my breathing mask kit yesterday and two breathing air bottles to mount in the boat today.  Every couple days the UPS truck comes in with something new like uniform patches, in-boat camera system, helmet and the like.  Just like any form of racing, getting ready for the first one will take a lot of effort.  I think the time required for preparation will slow down as the season goes on as there aren't too many moving parts on a boat to work on or change from week to week.  That's good news because to this point I haven't found anyone who even knows where the moving parts of a boat are located or how to change them if they should need it.  I guess we'll learn that on the fly as well.  Other than getting the proper propeller for the water conditions the rest is pretty much up to the driver.  As far as setup there isn't really isn't any comparison to how we get the cars ready each weekend.

We'll, we're working with Amtek Signs about our paint scheme and debating whether to wrap the boat or paint and letter it.  I want an eye-catching design that will draw attention so expect something pretty cool!

So, if you are looking for a great time and a belly full of laughs then Pittsburgh may be the place for you on July 4th weekend.  The festival website is at www.threeriversregatta.net if you want to check out what will be happening.

Dana Tomes

SATURDAY, MAY 22, 2010 - Herd Racing announced today that we are going to compete full time in the American PowerBoat Racing SuperLeague in 2010, beginning Jul 3-4 in Pittsburgh in the North American Championships.

We waited until today to make the announcement because I had to complete my APBA training in order to gain approval as a pilot of the boat.  That training concluded last night at Wright State University in Dayton, OH, where I completed the capsule training program.  That segment of the training involved being strapped into the capsule of a tunnel hull boat with your fire suit, capsule suit, helmet, gloves, and other garb on and dropped into a swimming pool upside down to simulate a crash.  The object of the test is to remove the capsule window covering, remove the steering wheel, remove your five-point seatbelt, radio cords and get out of the boat and swim to the surface before you drown.  Luckily, all 21 apprentice race boat pilots from across the U.S. and Canada who were at the training succeeded.  Being the test was in a controlled atmosphere and there were rescue divers in the pool, it wasn't so scary.  But, I am sure when this happens on a muddy river at 90 mph with no warning that it will be completely terrifying.  Hopefully I won't have to experience that joy, but if it does happen, the boats have backup breathing air systems you can breath from until you escape the crash.

Anyway, getting my capsule training completed was the final step in getting my APBA pilot's license and approval from the SuperLeague to race in 2010.  We wanted to hold the announcement of boat racing, although we have been working on this project for many weeks, until we were sure I was going to be able to drive.  The second option, had my approval not gone so well, would have been to try to lure a current driver away from another team until I was ready.

So, with today's announcement, we now have some things to talk about and the absence of news we have experiencing since our NASCAR Nationwide attempt in Nashville in early April is hopefully over.  I will try to post at least a couple blogs a week keeping you up to date on our progress on the waterways and asphalt and dirt circle tracks.

In other news, keep Brett Rowe in your prayers as he is working with doctors in Huntington and Lexington, KY to see what is next with the arterial problem he has been having with his leg.  When I last talked to him a couple days ago he had not decided exactly what they were going to do to try to fix it, but the bottom line is that he is probably not going to be driving a race car for at least a few months or maybe longer.  Continue to pray that Brett's treatment and outcome go well and he can get back into the racing element when he recovers. Who knows, maybe we can talk Brett into a tunnel boat later this fall!

Also, I am sure you have heard the news about NASCAR Sprint Cup driver Brian Vickers.  Brian is suffering from blood clots which is extremely bad news.  He has been pulled from the car for the remainder of the season and this could possibly end his career much to soon.  I pray that Brian's recovery will go well as from what I am reading his condition sounds very serious.

Lastly for today, Chad and Kevin Beahr take to Virginia Motor Speedway tonight in their sportsman and modified Herd Racing #75 entries and Michael Gaier continues to ready his #75 late model ride down in Charlotte so more news can be found right here in the coming days.  Thanks for stopping by.

Dana Tomes 

WEDNESDAY, MAY 19, 2010 - Some exciting news is in the works involving Herd Racing and our plans to take our racing to America's rivers as our team prepares to announce our intentions to run full time in the American Powerboat SuperLeague Formula 3 tunnel boat series.

You heard me right.  We are going boat racing in America's oldest and most prestigious powerboat racing series, the APR Superleague.  We will be making a formal announcement on the website early next week, but like we always try to do, those of you who are loyal to the blog get the inside information first.

Herd will run a #75 SST-60 tunnel boat in the Formula 3 class, the second tier series in American powerboating behind the Formula 2 boats.  Our first boat is being readied now in Illinois and we will be spending some time in Illinois doing some testing before taking to the water for compeition on July 3.

Herd will run the full season in the APR Superleague beginning at the North American Powerboat Championships in Pittsburgh, PA on July 3 and 4.

We will be making driver and crew announcements in the coming weeks, so if you are up for the excitement of NASCAR racing with a little whitecaps thrown in just for a challenge then we hope you will follow the team as we compete this year across America.

Stay tuned as more information is forthcoming in the next week or so.

Dana Tomes

THURSDAY, MAY 13, 2010 - I have been itching to let you in on some developments in the past couple of weeks, but until today there wasn't anything official that I could release.  But, I can promise much more news in the coming weeks about Herd Racing and our involvement in at least two new racing ventures.

First off, I would like to welcome Michael Gaier to our team of drivers.  If you haven't visited the front page of the website then you aren't aware that Michael will be fielding a #75 Ford Fusion in the PASS Late Model Series in North Carolina beginning on June 4.  He will be sponsored by EyeEarn.com, an affiliate of new Herd Racing supporter TripleClicks.com.

We will be getting more into the TripleClicks.com deal in the coming days, but if it shakes out the way things are looking right now then it could be a very expansive sponsorship that will extend to Herd Racing entries in at least five different racing series and possibly more.  TripleClicks.com is the internet classified advertising company I have been mentioning for a while.  We had thought it wouldn't materialize until fall, but while it won't start all at once, it is progressing faster than we originally anticipated it would.

Stay tuned for more on this topic as we get more information.

Speaking of our Herd Racing drivers, I would like to ask you to remember Brett Rowe in your prayers.  Brett had surgery on his leg a few weeks prior to our Daytona attempt and we all thought things were going well but his condition in recent weeks has worsened and he may be facing surgery again.  I don't have any details at this point and I am sure it isn't anything career-threatening, but anytime you have surgery it is something serious that takes months to recover from and hits you mentally as well as physically.  Keep him in your thoughts and prayers if you would.

Also, I would like to congratulate Kevin Beahr for his 17th place feature finish in the Modified Division at Virginia Motor Speedway last Saturday night.  Kevin hoped for a better showing during the 21-car feature event, but his #75 Herd/Beahr joint entry suffered some oil pressure issues which caused him to make two unplanned pit stops to work on the car.  I know he will be restless until his next event in two weeks.

Chad Beahr also will be taking to the track in two weeks in his Sportsman Class ride at Virginia Motor Speedway.  He sat out the first race weekend to help crew Kevin's entry but says his #75 Ford will be ready for the track weekend after next.

Stay tuned.  Things are coming together and rather quickly.  We will have an announcement coming in the next few weeks about running full time in another national racing series so check back for that news.  We'll let the cat out as soon as we can but if things continue to develop as they have in the past few weeks then we may have #75 vehicles running all over the country!

Dana Tomes 

THURSDAY, MAY 06, 2010 - I wanted to report on how our first night at the shop went on Monday night.  We got quite a bit of stuff cleaned up and shelved.  Greg and Gregory Smith were there, along with myself and J.D. Leedy.  We expected a few others, but maybe we can pick them up as we go along.

We got the Craftsman race truck washed, battery charged and got it started.  We took some photos and emailed them to a few people who are interested in buying it.  I am trying to move all of the Camping World Truck Series stuff out.  With the current economy and the low purses being paid in the truck series, I just can't see us entering that series at the present time.  As I always say, a sponsor and a check could change all of that, but right now we have four trucks in the shop which take up about half of our floor space.  If you know anyone who may be interested we have the race truck and the simulator truck listed at www.racingjunk.com and we will list the other two when these first two sell.  Both are receiving some interest so hopefully we will be able to move them pretty quickly.

Things are progressing nicely on the topic of our entering another racing series this summer.  We have found the equipment we need to run the series full time and are negotiating with the potential sellers.  We have made application for owner's and driver's licenses to the two sanctioning bodies which oversee the series.  The preparation will likely take a few weeks as we have to travel all over the U.S. and Canada to look at the equipment we need and are emailing photos back and forth trying to get what we need to enter the racing series.  Stay tuned.  This one is going to be a lot of fun if we can pull it together!

Also, Chad is finishing up his late model this week in hopes of his season debut at Virginia Motors Speedway this weekend.  The Herd/Beahr Racing co-op will field an entry in the late model division as well as the modified division.  Those cars will race every other weekend during the summer and I have asked Chad to send up some photos of the cars when they are ready for the track.  Both will carry sponsorship from DuVita.

Also, we hope to have another productive Shop Nite this coming Monday.  Hoping to begin sanding and refinishing the floors in the hauler and continuing to rid the shop of junk and do some organizing.  Another night and the shop will be looking half way presentable.

Come by and see us some Monday night.  I will try to post a photo of the shop during a blog entry next week sometime.

Also, more news will be coming about the possible new racing venture if our plans continue to move forward as they are right now, and we are getting closer on the Nationwide sponsorship deal with the internet auction company.  NASCAR has given us the green light to proceed on that sponsor and we have the final numbers in front of them to consider and should have something to report on that front as well before the end of May.

While we may not be at the track, things are still hopping in Herd Racing land!

Dana Tomes 

SUNDAY, MAY 2, 2010 - Herd Racing is trying to do some things that will get the general fan and those of you who like to read this blog more into the action.  For starters we will begin hosting "Shop Nite" on Monday evenings from 6 to 8 p.m. where anyone can come by and lend a hand with whatever may be going on.  Tomorrow's first Shop Nite will involve some general cleanup, organization of tools and supplies and getting one of our old Craftsman Trucks up and ready for sale.  The truck has been listed on www.racingjunk.com for sale and is drawing some interest from those who want to see some more photos so it is time to blow off the dust, charge the battery and fire up the old Ford.

In addition, I have been talking with the techo guys where I attend church about their helping bring Herd Racing into the 21st century in a way that the fans and families out there can share in what is going on.  We will begin talking about this Monday evening and will talk about what we need to do to get the ball rolling.

Our goal is to have a live Shop Cam that feeds live video to the website during Shop Nite activities.  We also are working on bringing this technology to the track in the lower racing series which permit it.  NASCAR will not allow broadcasts from its events, but smaller series like those Chad Beahr participates in and the one we are considering getting involved in will probably allow us to do this.  In fact, I understand that driver cams, hauler cams and things like this are available.  Our first step will be determining what technology we can go with for the least amount of money and then go from there.  I will keep you posted.  We have began our own TV production at church and our services are now broadcast live on the internet on Sunday mornings.  That gave me the idea.  I thought some of you may enjoy logging on for a few minutes on Monday nights and seeing what is happening at the shop.

On the sponsorship front, we are continuing to talk to the internet company I mentioned a few blogs ago about doing something in NASCAR or ARCA later this year.  I thought it probably wouldn't come to fruition until later this fall, but it looks like things are coming along quite well and once NASCAR gives us the green light we will hopefully have something to announce.  The sponsor hasn't determined which series will best serve their needs at this time but everything from ARCA to Cup has been presented to them.  I suspect they will start small and see how it goes, but we'll hopefully soon find out.

If you live locally stop by and see us Monday night.  Pizza comes at 6.  Lights turned out at 8.  As for those of you who would like to watch from home, we're working on it.

Dana Tomes

SATURDAY, MAY 1, 2010 -- Not much to report from the home front today but here are a few updates as to what's been happening as far as racing goes.

The superspeedway car was loaded onto a hauler bound for L.A. on Thursday night.  It will be part of a club road racing series in California and Nevada so it will find a new life after NASCAR.  While the selling of complete updated chassis would usually allow for the purchase of something else or the pocketing of some profit, this sale was used to help bale water from the Daytona and Nashville storms.  The good news is that the Goodyear tire bill for both races has been satisfied and the red ink is becoming more manageable.

The team currently has a Craftsman Truck show truck listed on www.racingjunk.com for sale.  It is a Ford from the 2005 race season and has a motor, transmission and looks pretty much the way it did when it left the track after the 05 campaign.  We painted it and re-lettered it, but it comes complete with a 351ci Ford engine and would make an excellent show truck for a team, business or sponsor.  Asking price is $8,500 complete or $5,000 for the rolling chassis.

After talking with Brett several times in the past few weeks we have decided to idle the Nationwide Series program for the time being.  Neither he nor I can afford to go to the track again without some significant sponsorship so barring some cash infusion from a sponsor the #75 will be parked for a while as far as Nationwide racing goes.

As for other racing plans, Chad Beahr's 2010 dirt series campaign at Virginia Motor Speedway got rained out last weekend and the track has plans to have opening night next weekend there in Virginia.  Chad will pilot the team's late model entry while his nephew will field a modified entry.  Both cars should sport the #75.

We also hope to go ARCA racing with Chad in the #89 Racing With Jesus ARCA car later this year.  There are again two ARCA races at Pocono and we continue to try to raise enough funds to get to one or both of those races.  Chad finished 26th at Pocono last year in Herd's first ever ARCA entry.  We could attempt each of those races for just $5000 in sponsorship, a great deal for a sponsor looking for some national TV time on SPEED.

Also, we may have an announcement soon about another racing series that is being considered.  We are on a fact-finding mission this coming week about potentially running a full season in another national touring series, but we just aren't quite ready to spill the beans just yet.  There is some sponsor interest from several fronts in this possible new venture so that is promising and the series is something that I think we could make a pretty big splash in should we decide to take the plunge.

More to come as it develops.

Dana Tomes

FRIDAY, APRIL 23, 2010 - It has been another busy week away from the track getting some things done that will hopefully pay dividends down the road.

The first thing accomplished this week was our race shop door and wall were repaired on Monday and Tuesday so the eyesore that has been a reminder of our dismal Daytona performance is finally repaired and the shop exterior looks back to normal.  Now we can move on with some other shop work this coming week and beyond like running some more water lines for hoses and RV fillups, continue organizing and continue bringing in tools and supplies.

Another accomplishment this week was that our Daytona speedway Dodge Charger is going to be sold.  A road-racer way out in sunny southern California has agreed to purchase the car and have it retrofitted to race in a club road racing series with other retired Sprint and Nationwide cars there on the west coast.  Being that the final race for the 105-inch current Nationwide cars on speedways is this weekend at Talladega, it is good to see the car find a new life beyond the show car circuit.  We are going to remove some speedway stuff and put some stuff on the car before sending it off sometime next week.

I also was able to get our marketing proposal to a major restaurant chain this week that I have been talking with for a few months.  We gave them a proposal for a full 2011 Nationwide effort so we will now sit back and see if they have any questions.  Right now the economy's uncertain future has just about every company running the opposite direction when you mention motorsports marketing, but it is a good time to get in the sport.  Teams are hungry and the price is right so I image customer service across the sport has taken a huge leap in the past couple of years since sponsors have become much harder to find.

We are continuing talks with an internet auction-type business which is made up of several hundred thousand individuals around the world.  The company has shown interest in NASCAR and we have sent some preliminary information to NASCAR for approval consideration.  Once NASCAR gives us the green light to proceed we will begin talking about what series and how many races the company may want to pursue.  It is possible something could be working in a couple of months, but we'll just have to wait and see what the negotiations bring forth.  I would expect that it may be late fall before this could develop, but who knows.

Tomorrow night is the opening of the dirt modified and sportsman seasons for Chad Beahr at Virginia Motor Speedway near Richmond.  Chad is planning to run the full season in the sportsman car while his brother's son will pilot the team's modified entry.  They are still waiting on final word from the track, but if things work out as planned, both will be sporting the #75 as they did last season.  We'll post some photos and follow the Herd/Beahr Racing efforts on the website each step along the 11-race summer schedule.

And, next weekend the Nationwide boys visit Richmond International Raceway where Chad, Joe Gilley and Will Clark have signed on the dotted line to help Morgan Shepherd and his Faith Motorsports guys at the Bubba Burgers 300 at RIR.  Being Morgan's program has suffered financially as well, it is good that a couple different Herd guys continue to go along pretty much weekly to help that team out.

Even though we aren't at the track as planned, many things continue in Herd Racing land!

Dana Tomes

SATURDAY, APRIL 17, 2010 - Another week has slipped by and I have failed to report anything at all about what has been happening in the world of Herd Racing.  Yes, believe it or not, Herd Racing has it's own little world here, the only thing is that only a few of us know of its existence, but I will do my best to offer all of you a small portal into it periodically.

Anyway, here is what's been going on.  Brett Rowe spoke Tuesday night to the men's fellowship group at Steele Memorial United Methodist Church in Barboursville, WV.  The men there gather once each month on a Tuesday night to enjoy a light fellowship meal with one another, fellowship and catch up on the latest news, and they typically have an after-dinner speaker who talks about something related to the men's group mission.

Brett spoke Tuesday to the group about how God sometimes works in mysterious ways and you don't often see the point or the impact of what you might be doing until some time down the path.  Brett spoke about his two decades in the matress industry, his foray into NASCAR racing and how God led him to lead the youth program at his home church in Roach, WV.  The important thing, as Brett says, isn't what God has you doing, or where you are doing it, but what you do with the opportunities you are given.

Brett has always wanted to drive in NASCAR's highest series and make his living from the racing industry, but maybe God's plan is for him to minister to the masses in some other way.  He fully realizes that and if it be the case as we progress in this journey then I am sure Brett is ready to serve whereever and however God instructs.

Another good news item is that our shop door and wall disaster from back in February will finally be repaired this coming week.  The building contractor told me this week that they will have a crew start on the repairs on Tuesday so if things go well the metal should look good the garage door should open by the end of the week.

I spent Tuesday in the Charlotte area for some meetings.  Things progressed well and I was able to pick up some needed supplies and parts from some top teams while there and spent the evening at a motorsports auction in Denver, NC.  I used the opportunity to stock up on some of the smaller items we never seem to have when we need them like speciality clamps, hoses, fittings and the like.  Again, parts stores in West Virginia don't cater to NASCAR teams so we have to have what we need in stock or the result is a delay in what we are doing.  We are slowly progressing on that front and once the building is fixed this coming week we can spend some more time getting the shop better organized, shelves labelled, parts bins stocked and that sort of thing.  The goal is that the next time we go racing we will be better prepared.

I also had a meeting Thursday afternoon with the motorsports director for one of the country's biggest oil manufacturers.  It was very encouraging and he is going to work out a proposal for the team to consider whereby the team would receive a product sponsorship of lubricants and oils, and would receive a sponsorship commission if we can open the doors for them to some potential customers in our area.  Being that my day job is very tied in with the region's coal, logging and oil industries, I think it would be something that could develop into some income for us.  I'll fill you in as it develops.  Also, keep your eye on our Product Sponsors and Supporting Sponsors pages in the coming weeks as I am going to be adding some companies in there who are coming on board to help us build for 2011.  This makes the second lubricant company this year to approach us and ask for help getting their products into the NASCAR fan's view so that is encouraging.

Lastly for today, last night was the American Cancer Society's Relay for Life battle against cancer walk in Huntington, WV.  The team had the Ford Camping World Truck race simulator at the event for participants to drive.  It was set to "NASCAR Challenge" where fans tried to get around a lap at Daytona without wrecking or running off the racing surface.  It was very tough and only a few made a complete lap without being disqualified. (See photos on photo gallery page later this weekend.)

Participants in the walk could donate $5 to the American Cancer Society in return for a test drive in the simulator truck.  Quite a few took the opportunity even though it rained on the event from start to finish.  It seems Herd Racing brings with it rain every where it goes.  I was doing some thinking.  Maybe we should tour the midwest in late summer and set up appearances in agricultural areas stricken with drought.  We could rake in enough money to field 3 or 4 teams with that effort as we would surely carry Biblical rains with us at every stop.

Back on topic, a few hundred walked in the event and the organizers had hoped to raise up to $15,000 for cancer research at the event.  It was a joy to be able to help raise a little money for a good cause.  Team member Greg Smith, along with family, Krystal, son Gregory, and father-in-law, Pete, came along to help man the truck and load/unload the truck in the steady rain.  Thanks guys for making it happen as you so often do!

Lastly, it was neat to see the Marshall University Memorial Fountain again as the event last night was held at the Memorial Student Center on Marshall's campus.  The memorial honors the 75 people who died in the 1970 MU plane crash.  It features 75 pipes which rise to the top of the fountain and there is always 75 fresh cut roses lying on the shelf around the fountain.  It was kind of cool to have the #75 Herd Racing truck sitting just feet away from the fountain helping raise money for a good cause, being that our team's number and name are also memorials to those who were lost in that tragic crash which shook our whole region four decades ago.

I guess the moral of the rambling story is that while the efforts weren't on the track, the team was able to do good in some ways this week - and that's the most important thing, isn't it!

Dana Tomes

MONDAY, APRIL 12, 2010 - I guess its been about a week since any updates have been put out there.  Lots has been going on away from the track to help keep the ball rolling in a positive direction.  Here are some tidbits of what's been happening lately.

For starters, the Herd Racing #75 Ford F-150 Camping World Truck Series simulator truck will be at the Marshall University/American Cancer Society Relay for Life event on campus from 7 to 8 p.m. on Friday, April 16.

Cancer is something that has touched all of us in some way.  The old saying is that if you live long enough you will have the unfortunate opportunity to battle cancer.  I hope that isn't true, but as people live longer, more chemicals are used in our foods and more pollution enters our air and water then the better chance we have to have to deal with it someday.

I had my battle with cancer at age 23, but fortunately was able to beat it with a single surgery and about six weeks of radiation therapy.  I have been cell free for about 17 years now so I am thankful for the medical technology that events such as Relay for Life raises funds for.

If you get a chance, stop by and see some of the team and try your hand at the truck simulator.  We are looking for a couple volunteers to help man the truck for the event so if you are willing to put on a Herd t-shirt and assist Relay participants with taking a "drive" in the truck then I hope you will contact us.  The event is free so if you want to participate in the Relay for Life, or just drive the truck, stop by and see us.  The event is being held on the intramural field behind the dormitories on campus in Huntington, WV.

On to other news, Herd car chief Morris Van Vleet helped turn wrenches on Morgan Shepherd's #89 Nationwide entry at Phoenix last weekend and is on loan to the team again next week at Texas as he stayed with the team to help prepare the Texas car for this weekend's O'Reilly 300 at Texas Motor Speedway.

Brett and I talked a couple times today about our next race for the #75 Herd program, but decided Talladega on April 24 was just too soon to get back to the track without some funding.  I guess we are in the same boat as a lot of programs.  Try to run a few out of your pocket to see if you can get going and, if not, sit back and reconsider what to do next.  That's where we are at now.  Not sure what the future holds.  We will be back, just not sure yet how and where.

The Talladega car and motor was listed on www.racingjunk.com tonight for sale, lease or rent.  If a team or driver brings some money we would be willing to field them at Talladega, but we just don't have the money or sponsorship to make a Herd entry with Brett in the car at this point. Our hope is another team will buy the car and motor outright so we can use the money to get back on decent footing and make another couple attempts this spring.

We have a couple proposals to get out this week for sponsorship possibilities and are still working on a way to get the DuVita sponsorship back to the track a time or two this year, but right now the horizon for the short term looks pretty bleak.

I'll get back to you with some more information as it happens.  Will be in NC tomorrow for some meetings and working with the Marshall alumni folks to maybe do something at the Spring Green and White football game on April 24, but nothing major to report right now.

Check back in soon.

Dana Tomes 

EASTER SUNDAY, APRIL 4, 2010 - You would think that after the kind of weekend that Herd Racing endured in Nashville over the past couple of days that I would have preferred to have hit the snooze button and taken the day off on Sunday morning.  Yes, I was tired after driving the hauler back solo from Nashville and reflecting nearly the whole trip on our weekend.  I thought about how regardless of how hard we tried, the opportunity to race just wasn't in the cards this time.  I wondered why we have to struggle so hard to do something that seems so simple to other teams.  I also talked to my best friend Jesus as the MRN broadcast of the Nashville 300 faded in and out on the radio as I drove back up I-65 toward home.

I was really kind of shocked that I wasn't more upset.  Actually, when I pulled out of the garage with the four other haulers who failed to make the race on Saturday I have to admit I had a real calm about the whole thing.  Don't get me wrong.  I fully realized the impact of our failing to make the race will burn financially for some time as we try to fiqure out ways to get some sponsorship flowing in order to make it to the track again.  I even thought back about how the financial pain from Daytona was still being felt and how now the hole was even deeper.  I thought about a lot of things.  That's why a seven-hour drive by yourself is sometimes good for you.

There was a lot of thoughts flowing through my head, like "Why did it work out that I was assigned a single room at the Holiday Inn Express in Nashville - where I reflected a lot during the weekend - when we all usually have a roommate on race weekend?"  "Why did my sixth-floor hotel room window overlook the headquarters of Lifeway, one of world's biggest publishers of God's learning materials, which sent me thinking every time I pulled curtain back?"  "Why did I sit in the hauler with amazement as the beautiful sun rose on Friday morning as I stared at the name Jesus which adorned the rear of the Faith Motorsports hauler which entered the track ahead of me?"  "Why did I not worry a bit when a major thunderstorm hit the track and looked as if qualifying would be rained out on us for the second time this year?"  "Why was it that my tiny eight-year-old daughter would help lead a classmate to Christ on the weekend I was out of town and it would impact me so much as my wife told me over the phone on Friday?"

I'll be the first to admit that I'm far from a scholar and I will never be a threat to win any contests that involve using the human mind, but as I popped up from bed this morning I knew this was going to be one of my best Easter weekends ever.  Yes, I got the real meaning of Easter first-hand this weekend.  A great morning at church, a great afternoon with family and a great weekend strengthening my relationship with my Savior Jesus Christ.

I guess God was telling me that there are many things in this world which are much bigger than racing.  I have tried telling myself the same thing many times, but for some reason it just didn't sink in until I heard it from Him in so many different ways over the past few days.

I'm not sure if anyone else received a blessing from our trip to Nashville this weekend but I for one did!  I got to spend time with a lot of people who also love the Lord, while doing the things we love to do.  We didn't get to race on Saturday afternoon, but we did get a three-hour jump on enjoying Easter Sunday!

I hope you also will think about the impact of Easter and experience the joy of knowing that Earth's many setbacks are simply just not that big of a deal.  Happy Easter!

Dana Tomes

FRIDAY, APRIL 3, 2010 - As the sun peaked above the grandstands at Nashville Superspeedway, I had every hope that Good Friday 2010 would be just that - good.  Boy was I wrong - or was I.

Friday was one of the most trying days Herd Racing has ever experienced and it is amazing that we fought through the adversity to earn the right to attempt to qualify for the Nashville 300 on Saturday morning.

Here's a little portal into some of our day's events.  Being a part time team low in the points standings we go through technical inspection nearly last.  Everything in NASCAR works in a way that rewards the best teams who have earned the right to participate.  The new, small and part time teams have to earn their keep every week.  Thats the price we pay to get to participate.

About an hour before first practice we were told that our fuel cell rack did not meet specifications.  That led to two hours of cutting, welding and fabricating, and created the problem that nearly ended our day.  We got through the fuel cell issues, but the welding on the car caused electrical currents to pass through the car's frame and short out our ignition system.  Needless to say we missed first practice due to the fuel cell repairs.  We were ready for happy hour but on our first lap the ignition cut out.  Brett switched to the backup ignition and it too failed.  The #75 didn't even complete a single lap before we were back in the garage, powerless.

We checked everything from carberator, fuel lines, spark plugs, distributor, coils, etc.  The chances of both ignition systems being down were extremely rare so that wasn't our first suspicion.  Once we diagnosed the problem, the fix was the next problem.  Every team has a primary ignition and a backup ignition.  We went through both before even getting on the track.

We borrowed one from the #81 backup car (Thank you Randy MacDonald) and was able to rig up enough of an electrical system to turn two slow laps.  In NASCAR you must run at least one lap under power in practice in order to be allowed to attempt to qualify.  We accomplished that with four minutes left in the final practice, just making the deadline to earn our right to make a qualifying attempt.

Brett's dad, Ronnie who had just arrived at the track for final practice, is flying back home Friday night to fetch some more backup parts and will fly them back to the track before daylight on Saturday.  If all goes well we will have the car ready to qualify at 11 a.m.

I have not had many days in my racing time that have been so challenging.  Freak things happen, but they happened to us twice in one day.  A day we wanted to do our best to let DuVita see how much fun NASCAR racing can be.  A day we needed to go well.

As I sat in the hotel around midnight I began to think about Good Friday and the kind of day my Savior Jesus had 2010 years ago to the date.  Our perils suddenly seemed so minimal and I saw the blessing that our team received today.  We overcame huge odds and will live on to compete tomorrow.

We showed that by hanging together and keeping our focus on our goal that tomorrow will come.  So, we will see if the rains allow us to qualify, and if so, we will put a car on the track that has seen basically no practice time operated by a driver who has had basically no practice time.  Making the race at this point is honestly not going to be easy as the field is now up to 48 entries.

But you know what.  Regardless of the outcome at the track tomorrow morning, we can go home knowing we did our best with what we had to work with and we realize that our daily struggles are not much to worry about when you look at the big picture.

Think about the real meaning of Easter and sacrifice that was made by Christ so many years ago.  Everything else is simply a hurdle we just need to fiqure out how to get over.

Say a prayer for Brett and his qualifying effort tomorrow morning.

Dana Tomes

TUESDAY, MARCH 30, 2010 - This might be my last post before we roll out for Nashville on Thursday morning.  Things are coming together.  Brett and Morris finished up the car preparations today while Greg, Sterling and Hubert worked in the shop and hauler getting the tools organized, pit boxes stocked and installing new tie downs in the hauler.

Other than fueling the tractor, loading up and getting a wash job on the hauler, we are pretty much ready to shove off.  Greg and Randy are going down on Wednesday for a day of relaxation in Nashville before the race weekend.  Chad, Joe and Will will be driving from their homes in Richmond to the Herd Racing shop tomorrow, and Morris and Brett will likely spend much of Wednesday loading up before we all pull out on Thursday morning.

We will have a full weekend of fun ahead of us at Nashville starting with an appearance from 5 to 7 p.m. Central Time at the Pondersosa Steakhouse in Lebanon, TN, on Thursday.  The event has grown from just a stopover appearance for Brett to a full-blown Thursday night hoe down.  The car will be on display for two hours in front of the restaurant, Brett will sign autographs and hand out hero cards and schedule cards; the DuVita folks will promote their products and we have even added a country music concert to the mix featuring Nashville musician Mary Elizabeth Murphy. Throw in some DuVita product and apparel giveaways and some free Ponderosa gift certificates and you have a full evening.

All of the events at the Ponderosa are free and open to the public so if you are in the Nashville area come on by and enjoy the evening.

If you miss the team Thursday night there will be plenty more activities as the weekend progresses.  Brett and the team will sign autographs from 9 to 10 p.m. Friday night at the Holiday Inn Express on Broadway in downtown Nashville.  The event will take place in the lobby so stop by and talk racing with Brett, crew chief Chad Beahr and car chief Morris Van Vleet.

Brett also will be involved in Fan Fest earlier in the day on Friday at the Nashville Superspeedway.  Many of the Nationwide and Camping World Truck drivers will participate in a Meet and Greet from 1 to 2 p.m. in the Fan Zone near Gate 3 outside the track.

On Saturday, Brett and Chad will take part in a DuVita press conference in the media center at the track at 10 a.m. and then qualifying and the Nashville 300 will fill the late morning and afternoon schedule on Saturday.

The entry list for the race has been posted and it looks like that after a bit of shuffling there will be 47 cars at the track.  I guessed a little over 50 so I am pleasantly suprised at the entry list.  Now we just need to find a little speed and we should be racing on Saturday afternoon!

Dana Tomes

SUNDAY, MARCH 28, 2010 - I thought I would take a few minutes today to talk to you about our Nashville sponsor, DuVita, LLC, and bring you up to speed on exactly what DuVita is and why they have partnered with Herd Racing's NASCAR Nationwide Series program.

DuVita, is Italian for "two lives" and is a new company just launched in January, that manufactures and sells healthy living supplements through independent associates around the world.  You won't find DuVita on the shelves at your local drug store or department store, but you can find DuVita online and through local independent marketing associates around the country.  They offer two healty products in either capsule or pixi stick powder form.  Balance + works to keep your body in balance.  Appetite + works to help curb your appetite and help you loose weight.

Right now DuVita has about 1,500 people across the U.S. who have signed up to sell their products.  The comany's compensation plan is patterned after some of the most successful multi-level marketing companies in existence.  I know, you have tried multi-level marketing before and have nothing to show for it.  We have all been there and probably most of us have had a similar bad experience.

My hope, and my true belief, is that DuVita is different.  In fact when Herd Racing entered into a marketing agreement with the company before their launch, we begin making money the very first month.  In fact, I saw the potential so early on that this race car sponsorship idea quickly developed as a way to get the word out to the masses and hopefully get new associates signed up through the team and the exposure that NASCAR racing brings.

Here's how it works.  You sign up as an independent associate of DuVita.  As long as you agree to purchase the product for yourself each month you can receive commission on all of your sales and the sales of those who you sign up as associates under you.  The goal is to have five associates working under you selling products.  They would each have a few under them selling products and so on.  Before you know it, your web is pretty full of people selling the product and you would recieve commissions on all of the sales which take place under you as long as you remain active.  If you can get a few under you doing their job you will make money the very first month.  Herd Racing did!  Your only cost is the product you buy for yourself and you can quit without penalty at any time.

Another good thing is that everyone who signs up falls under Herd Racing and the team gets a small commission from your sales and the sales that take place below you.  So the team benefits from your efforts, and you benefit from your efforts and the efforts of those signed up under you.

My theory about multi-level marketing has always been that the first 10 percent who get in get rich and the last 90 percent who come in work to make the first 10 percent rich.  I don't know if that is true or not, but with only 1,500 members right now nationwide if you come in soon you will be in that first 10 percent and stand a much better chance of seeing a nice income as the web develops below you.

I want to make it clear that I am not pushing your involvement in DuVita.  Herd Racing is just presenting the opportunity to the public and should you decide to get involved I want you to have as much information as possible.  Myself and the team are here to help as much as we can.  If you want more information you can log on to our personal DuVita website at www.racetoduvita.com and type in your name, email address and phone number, and someone from DuVita will call you to answer any questions you have.  If you want to try the product for a week or so just contact me.  I will give you a sample of either product you want to try.  The website has all the information you will need to make an informed decision.

Remember, you don't have to sell it to take it.  If you just want to take the supplements you can contact us through the website to set yourself up as a customer.  But whatever you do, always contact DuVita through our team portal at www.racetoduvita.com.  If you access the company through the corporate website or another way then the team will not benefit from your actions.

My hope is that when the DuVita car is seen in Nashville that several people from NASCAR land will sign up and help fund the team's racing ventures.  Nothing would make us happier than to see a DuVita car out there on the track paying for itself every weekend!

Dana Tomes

FRIDAY, MARCH 26, 2010 - If you didn't get an opportunity to see the DuVita car during its unveiling on Tuesday night then there is still an opportunity before it enters the track at Nashville.

Herd Racing will be participating in a fan event on Thursday, April 1 at the Ponderosa Steakhouse in Lebanon, Tennessee.  The event will run from 5 to 7 p.m. central time, 6-8 p.m. eastern.  The event will feature the DuVita race car in front of the restaurant, driver Brett Rowe signing autographs for the customers and a gift certificate to the restaurant for a dinner for four will be given away by the store owner Billy Mullinax.  The DuVita folks will also be on hand to provide samples to fans and talk to them about their exciting new healthy living products.

On Friday, Brett Rowe will participate in two autograph signings.  One is from 1 to 2 p.m. at the Nashville Superspeedway fan zone which is near the Gate 3 entrance to the track.  A bunch of Camping World Truck Series and Nationwide Series drivers will particpate, including Brett, Morgan Shepherd, Carl Edwards and others.

Later that night, Brett will appear for a Meet and Greet in the lobby of the Holiday Inn Express from 9 to 10 p.m..  This event is open to the public.  Times for all of the events are Central.

There may be a few more things going in Nashville, outside of racing of course, but they have not all been planned out yet.  There may be another appearance for the car on Thursday either before or after the Ponderosa event, but that is still being worked on and will be reported as soon as something is finalized.  One thing is for sure.  We will be bolting immediately after the event on Saturday so everyone can get home for their Easter services on Sunday morning.

We are working on dotting the I's and crossing the T's this week as we prepare to pull out early Thursday morning.  The ECO-FIRST guys spent Thursday and Friday in the shop mounting fire extinguishers in the hauler, making small repairs and improvements here and there and installing new tie downs in the hauler floor.

The haulers enter the track at 7 a.m. on Friday morning with two practice sessions on Friday and then qualifying and racing on Saturday.

I am interested in finding out what the competition numbers will look like.  So far this year the fields have been strong.  My guess is that 51 cars will be at the track.  I guess we'll find out on Monday when NASCAR releases the preliminary entry list for the Nashville 300.

Wish us luck.  The happenings at Nashville could determine our immediate future one way or the other.  A strong showing would allow Talladega to show up on our schedule next.  A poor one might sideline the program for quite a while.

Dana Tomes

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 24, 2010 - The DuVita sponsorship announcement party last night was quite a fun time!  If case you have been hiding in a cave for the past few weeks, last night was the night we pulled the sheet off of the DuVita car which we will enter in the Nashville 300 on Easter weekend.  The event was pretty awesome.

Amber McAdams and Nelson Crowe, founders of DuVita, were there to talk to the crowd about their company and products, and they brought a great group of people who are involved in their company to share in the fun.  Kevin Crandall, who is the operations manager of DuVita, was there, as well a two doctors who back their products and a host of others, including DuVita associates from Kentucky, Alabama and Florida.  John Darden, the guy to got the ball rolling on all of this, was also part of the show.

It was a blessing to see Amber's excitement over the race car and I am sure she will have even more fun when the DuVita folks get to the race track next weekend in Nashville.

There are a lot of people who helped pull off last night's event.  Brett Rowe has worked his tail off getting the car ready, Greg Smith has been a great help as usual and Karen LeGrand had an amazing spread of great food for the event.  Guy Driggers at C2C came up with a beautiful paint scheme, JD Leedy at MotorsportsRetro created a hero card and apparel line, Joe Gilley created a schedule card and the list goes on and on.  I just want to say thanks a million to everyone who played any role in the success.  Even our crew chief, Chad Beahr, traveled from Richmond, Virginia, to take part in the DuVita announcement.

Now we are in the preparation for Nashville mode and will be doing final setup on the car and begin packing the hauler later this week as we prepare for the trip south next Thursday morning.

We have a lot planned in Nashville, including at least two appearances for Brett or the car.  I will get more into that later this week.

If you were not able to get to last night's event, I hope you will check out the photos in our photo gallery and as always, any appreciation you can show to the sponsor would be a great help.  I hope you can email them or get on their Facebook page (www.facebook.com/duvitaofficial) and let them know you appreciate them and their support of Herd Racing.

Also, if you want to get involved with DuVita as a customer or independent sales rep, you can log on to www.racetoduvita.com to sign up.

Thanks everyone for a great event!

Dana Tomes 

MONDAY, MARCH 22, 2010 - You have probably seen the advertisement on the front page of the website for the past two months or so with the paint scheme design and wondered what the connection was.  Well, now you know.

Tomorrow evening, DuVita will be announced as the primary sponsor of Herd Racing's #75 entry at Nashville Superspeedway on April 2-3.

Duvita's management team will be in Huntington tomorrow evening to meet with team members and driver Brett Rowe as the team unveils the DuVita Chevrolet Impala SS from 6 to 8 p.m. at Tri-State Fire Academy in Huntington, WV.

The team is real excited about the partnership, partly because DuVita is real excited about it.  The agreement will include a full line of DuVita racing apparel and accessories, and several events involving the team during the Nashville race weekend.  It also will include new sponsor-specific schedule cards and hero cards, the front of which you can see attached to this blog entry.

The team and DuVita will release the car's official paint scheme to the press tomorrow and we will post here on the website some photos from the evening announcement compliments of our photographer Rick Adkins.  Just check out the photo gallery pages to find a new DuVita Announcement folder where the action from tomorrow night will be located.

If you haven't clicked on the DuVita icon on the front of our website I encourage you to check them out.  They are a new company that has only been in business a few months.  They manufacture and market healthy living supplements, including appetite control products and products which create a healthy chemical balance for your body.  In addition, you can sign up to sell the products as an independent distributor and use the opportunity as a part-time income.

Our Crew Chief Chad Beahr is a DuVita representative and the team is set up as marketing partner as well.  That means that for every product fans buy through the website, www.racetoduvita.com, the team will get a cut of the profits.

There will be much more to announce about this relationship in the next few days, but I wanted you to get it here first.  I hope to have an update for you tomorrow night about our event.  Hope to see you there.

Dana Tomes

SATURDAY, MARCH 20, 2010 - Just three days until we are ready to unveil the Nashville car!

In fact, those of you who view this blog will find out a day earlier than the rest of the world.  We will send out the press releases and paint scheme design to the local and NASCAR media on Tuesday morning in preparation for our Tuesday night announcement event.  But, we will post the information here on the blog on Monday evening for you to get a sneak peak at the car and some sponsor information.

The website will have the car paint sheme and announcement story posted late Monday night so when the rest of the world gets the news on Tuesday the site will be ready for them.

I am real excited about Tuesday night!  I spent some time with Brett in the shop today getting the final decaling and cleanup done on the car.  I think the car will look as good in real life as the computer generated paint scheme.  I can't say our Daytona car turned out as good as I thought it would, but I can say this one will not disappoint.

I guess the Herd guys are heading home from Bristol tonight.  Crew Chief Chad Beahr, Car Chief Morris Van Vleet and Tire Specialist Will Clark made the trip to the bull ring to help get the Faith Motorsports car in the show.  I am happy to report that Morgan qualified his Chevy into the field in 34th and ran just over half way before he ran the rubber off the eight tires he had in his inventory.

Speaking of Chevrolets, our Nashville entry will be the Chevy Impala SS with an Earnhardt-Childress engine.  It is the same engine we ran at the Montreal road course last August finishing 21st, but it will be the first time this car has gone to the track with a Chevy body.  It is the same Yates chassis that was formerly the Marshall Dodge Charger which attempted Charlotte in May 2008 but hasn't been to the track since.

Well, one more day in the shop on Monday to get the lettering done and we will need it.  This car isn't just one color paint.  It has lots of color so it is taking a few days to get the decaling right.  Can't wait to show it to you.

Also, Brett is updating his Facebook page pretty much every day so if you haven't seen it yet you may take a peak.  You may learn a little more about our Tuesday event there as well.

Dana Tomes

TUESDAY, MARCH 16, 2010 - Things are moving fast on a couple of fronts.  Looks like our oil and lubricant partner may end up on the car as early as Nashville in two weeks, as is the case with Buck's Fabricating which we talked about yesterday.  Their deal also may progress fast enough to debut on the car at Nashville.  Both are good news for the team.  The more associations we can make the better off we are going to be in the long run.  Sponsors want to associate with teams which look secure and have other support.  Even if it is just a traded service or catering or hotel sponsor, we need all the help we can get.  So, if you work for a company or know of a company that might want to help we would love to talk to you.  We need oils, filters, belts, paints, gloves, shoes, clothes, shirts, hats, lubricants, sprays, bondo, tapes, soda, water, you name it.  Even if it is something too small to get a logo on the car, we can put them on the website or hauler so any and all leads are appreciated.  Not many teams can offer a NASCAR sponsorship without some major dollars changing hands.  As you know, we are not the norm in any form or fashion.

We still need to secure a longterm primary sponsor for a series of races or full season, but until then we will just do what we have to do to get the car to the track each week and if that means 20 different paint schemes a year then I guess that is what we will do.

Planning some weekend work on the hauler again.  This time we are mounting a first aid cabinet, power strips and fire extinguishers in the trailer.  It seems every race so far someone has gotten cut and we haven't had the supplies we needed to make the repair.  My finger gash last year at Montreal ended up being repaired with duct tape and I think Ronnie Rowe's finger slash at Daytona was surgically fixed with dinner napkins and Scotch tape.  Those situations will not happen again.  I ordered the mother of all first aid cabinets today.  It will bolt on the wall in the kitchen/lounge area of the trailer and features about everything you could want, short of a CT scanner and heart defibrilator.  If those two items are needed at the track then their ailment is probably one the team can't repair in the back of the hauler.

I know it sounds like I get excited about baby steps, but that's how it is when you try to run a NASCAR program with no funding.  A new tire, fire extinguisher, new helmet or new tool is a big deal because I know how hard it was to raise that $100 or whatever it took to buy that single item.  Some teams get excited over $3 million primary sponsorship deals, some cheer for a box of fender washers.  I guess the little things in life just seem to do it for me.  I'm not sure what I would do should something major come along.

If you can attend our sponsor announcement party next Tuesday then I hope you will try your hand at the Herd Racing pit stop challenge.  We have the front quarter of a Nationwide Series car rigged with a timer and you can try your hand at getting the front tire torqued down in record time.  We will have prizes for those who are able to defeat the competition that night.  Come and try to out gun the sponsors and win a sample of their new product line or a Herd Racing shirt or hat!

Dana Tomes 

MONDAY, MARCH 15, 2010 - Looks like some of the Herd guys will be Bristol bound this weekend while the rest of us stay behind to get ready for our sponsor event next Tuesday night, March 23.

Our crew chief Chad Beahr and tire specialist Will Clark will be making the trip to Bristol to lend a hand to the Faith Motorsports guys this weekend in an attempt to get Morgan Shepherd in the Scotts Turf Builder 300 at BMS.  Morgan will even has a sponsor on the rear quarters this weekend so we are pulling extra hard to help get the #89 in the show and help build his sponsor's image.

Lots of other things are going on in Herd Racing land this week.  I finished up our end of an oil and lubricant sponsorship deal today that Shannon Feldmann had solicited for us.  The offer is now back in the potential sponsor's hands, but I anticipate it will be a one-race product sponsorship for now and then we will be working on extending the deal longer term after both parties test out the waters.  I can't say who it is at this point, but I anticipate they will sign on later this week and we will hopefully have their logo on the car at a race in the next month or two, possibly as early as Talladega, if things go well for us at Nashville.  I assure you that you will recognize the name.

Also, we have received a single race associate sponsorship from Buck's Fabricating (www.bucksfab.com) which will likely also showcase at the Talladega race in late April.  We worked with Buck's back in 2008 to try to promote their products with our Camping World Truck Series simulator and show truck, but the economy sort of sputtered out in their industry about that time and we weren't able to get them on the car at a race.  While our current deal is just for one race and is a minor sponsorship, I know the guys at Buck's want to do more, but the economic situation right now just doesn't allow it.

More good news as NASCAR has approved our paint scheme and sponsor for Nashville so that information will be made public, most likely on Monday, March 22, when the smoke from Bristol clears.  We will introduce the sponsor and showcase the car on Tuesday of next week in Huntington, WV.  Check out www.herdracing.com a week from today for complete details, logos and a paint scheme of the car.  We would release the information now, but with Bristol coming up I am afraid that news about a Nashville sponsor might not get as much attention as we would like.

Back to work.  Will have some more news for you soon.

Dana Tomes

SATURDAY, MARCH 13, 2010 - Saturday turned out just the way I had hoped it would.  I haven't left the house all day.  What a perfect spring Saturday to just work on projects around the house and enjoy the drizzle outside.

Don't think I have just been lying around though.  I couldn't get that lucky.  Task #1 this morning involved chasing a mouse down who had gotten into the heating vent under the house.  Task #2 involved cleaning the lint out of the dryer hose and filters to get it back to work.  Task #3, which is scheduled for after dinner, will involve carting down all of the Easter decorations from the attic.  The trips to the attic are alway a joy (sarcasm).

But, I have gotten a lot done in the office as well.  Here are a few things we are working on:

We are working on designing a "Race Vase" through the legendary Blenko Glass Company.  I picked up a prototype sample last week.  We now need to get the prototype etched and then photographed.  It will look great when done and it will be a numbered collectible.  Blenko will produce these exclusively for Herd Racing and there will be only be 100 of them made.  They will sell for around $100 each and stand over a foot tall.  They are black glass with white etching.  It is kind of hard to explain, but once we have the etching done we will post an image.  At some point along the line, Blenko will be on the car and we will promote the vase at a race.  Our goal is to do something like this each year. They will all be numbered and dated so fans can collect one from each year.  More on this as we get further along, but it is very neat to be working with Blenko and creating art like this.  It won't be too many more years and blown glass will be a thing of the past.

Secondly, I found through our web statistics that I mentioned yesterday that we have a lot of followers who join us from different places each day.  One such group is Marshall University fans who have a Herd Fans Facebook page where they post news items about Marshall related activitities and sports.  Brian Lucas, a member of the group, says they are trying to get 10,000 members on their site.  If you want to check them out you can find their page at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Huntington-WV/HerdFanscom/166979840521.

The group over there posts news about Herd Racing from time to time so you should stop by, check them out and help them reach their membership goal if you are interested in following MU athletics.

As most of you probably know, Marshall University is how Herd Racing got its name.  When we formed back in 2007 our goal was to run a Marshall themed car and we hoped Marshall's corporate supporters would help make it happen.  The number 75 on our car is in memory of the 75 people killed in the Marshall plane crash back in 1970.  Many of our team members, including myself, my wife and Brett, also were students at Marshall back in our college day.  We attempted one race in 2008 with the Marshall colors and it was really made into a big deal, but we failed to qualify at Charlotte that day, hitting the wall in qualifying.

I say all of this to say, we would love to someday be able to run that Marshall-themed car full time.  Nothing would be sweeter than having that green and white car with the big M on the hood every weekend, but we would need some of the Marshall faithful to stand up and help us make that happen.  There are hundreds of big wheels in the business world out there who have ties to Marshall.  We just need a way to get to them the convince that that is would be something great to be part of.

In the meantime, we would even love to be able to run a smaller M on the B post or somewhere else on the car from time to time if we could find the fan support.  How about a Herd Fans Marshall car for one race with the Big Marshall M on the hood and the names of all of the Herd fans out there on it.  Sort of a fan tribute to the university of sorts.  We could have the car at a football game, sell sponsorships to fans, have them sign the car and then enter it at a fall race.  I think that would be really neat.

You see what happens when it rains and I can't get out.  The brain just never stops.

Dana Tomes

FRIDAY, MARCH 12, 2010 - I am thankful the weekend is here and also thankful that our local forecast calls for solid rain all day on Saturday.  That will give me a good excuse to put in a few hours in the office, watch some basketball and do pretty much nothing most of the day.

The last couple weeks have been pretty busy so I will be happy to have a break before our event on the 23rd and our trips to Nashville and possibly Talladega in April.

I did a little web research this evening about the team's website.  Believe it or not there is some pretty scary tracking technology out there in the computer world.  I don't have the knowledge of how to get to a lot of it or what to do with it if I could get it, but with just a little time I was able to track how many people visit Herdracing.com each day, each week, what time of day they visit, what pages they look at, how long they stay on the pages, who their internet provider is, what state the are from and lots of stuff like that.

So, here is a little information to share with you.  So far this month the website has seen 1009 unique visitors which has averaged about 84 new people per day through the first 12 days of the month.  The front page sponsorship video seems to be the most popular thing to click on for new viewers while the blog seems to be the most popular for returning visitors.  Interesting information to have.  Not sure what I will do with it now that I have it, but it was pretty cool to be able to see all kinds of stuff like that.  Seems like most of you come in for your daily check between 10 p.m. and midnight so I will try to have some new blog information up by that time on the nights I am able to post.

It was interesting that apparently of lot of those who come by either met us at the Huntington Symphony concert last summer or have linked to us through the symphony web site link.  We really enjoyed the symphony concert last August and were proud to be part of the biggest crowd the symphony had ever had for an outdoor concert.  I have posted the drawing that was in the local newspaper last summer of the conductor rising out of the Herd Racing #75 car.  I hope we get to do some more events like that in the future.  Hogan Haas, the director of the symphony, was great to work with.

Anyway, today was pretty good.  The hauler repairs were very painless for a change.  The transmission issue ended up being a $38 item called a clutch brake that had fallen off.  Apparently, when you push in the clutch this brake shoe on the clutch shaft stops the transmission from turning.  Took about 30 minutes to fix.  Secondly, got away from the tire store with one plug and one used tire so the invoices today were much more pleasant than what they could have been.  The tire tread being chunked off was caused because the tire beside it was flat and the one tire was carrying all of the weight.  So, the hauler should be ready for the road again come time for Nashville.

We are moving ahead on the sponsor event for the 23rd.  Got the proofs of the hero card and schedule card to the sponsor for editing today.  Should have everything done and to the printer early next week so we will be posting that information as soon as NASCAR signs off on the spnonsor and paint scheme.

I want to invite everyone to the event on the 23rd from 6 to 8 p.m. at Tri-State Fire Academy in Huntington.  There will be some food, some games and some time to get to know Brett, some team members and the sponsor.  I hope you can come and invite your friends to come too.  The more people the better showing it will be.

Thanks for checking in.  I will hopefully have some updates over the weekend.

Dana Tomes

THURSDAY, MARCH 11, 2010 - Things have been busy the last few days trying to get caught up.   Sorry I haven't updated the blog the past three days, but I have been on the road quite a bit so far this week and things are looking pretty full for tomorrow as well.

Well let's see what news we have accumulated since our last visit.

For one thing, we have secured the location of our March 23 Nashville sponsorship announcement.  The event will be from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Tri-State Fire Academy at 4200 Ohio River Road in Huntington, West Virginia.  We will have a 90-minute meet and greet with the sponsors and driver Brett Rowe inside the main banquet room at the fire academy and then unveil the Nashville car paint scheme for those in attendance during the last 30 minutes of the event.  We will let you in on who the sponsor is in the coming days, but are still waiting on NASCAR's approval before we let the cat out of the bag.

We will have sponsor hero cards at the event, and SportsRetro will be offering some new sponsor clothing additions to the team store page so you can get the sponsor's logos on apparel even before we get to the track.  I know JD has a couple different t-shirt designs for the sponsor awaiting their approval and they are currently reviewing the hero card design so things are moving on that front.

Speaking of SportsRetro, if you haven't ordered any team apparel I hope that you will consider it.  As you know, part of how Herd Racing gets funded is through sponsorship agreements.   The idea at Daytona was that we would run the MotorsportsRetro.com logo on the hood, lots of fans would get curious and buy shirts from the website and then the team would get a cut of the profits.  Unfortunately, since the car wasn't on the track, the sales have been pretty dismal, JD reports.  Help out if you can.  I am planning to order a t-shirt for my little girl tonight.

Also, we got the backup motor back to Mike Ege Racing on Tuesday, picked up some needed suspension parts and some shop supplies at Gavel Auction Tuesday night and the insurance adjuster looked at the garage damage on Wednesday so we hope to get the door replaced and the wall fixed from our pre-Daytona shop incident pretty soon.

The hauler is going to the shop for tires and transmission repairs in the morning.  Can't wait to find out what bad news will accompany those visits!

In other news, we are working toward an agreement with an oil and lubricant provider.  This will hopefully provide us with the needed oils, lubricants, greases and such beginning later this season.  I hope to have some news on that front in the next week or two.

Dana Tomes

SUNDAY, MARCH 07, 2010 - We are happy to announce we have added a hotel sponsor for the June race at Nashville and a caterer for the June race at Kentucky Speedway.  Both stories have been posted in the 2010 sponsor section of the website.

We added the Holiday Inn Express Nashville Airport as our hotel in Nashville and Bon Appetit! catering has come aboard as the caterer for Kentucky.  As we mentioned in an earlier blog entry, Bon Appetit! may come along to a handful of races in 2010 and help feed the gang.

I mention this to let you know how important it is for us to get this type of support any time we can.  If you just think of the bare minimum then we use at least 5-6 hotel rooms a night for 2-3 nights every time we go to the track.  As you know, room rates are inflated on race weekends, so not having a full hotel bill can save us a few thousand dollars a weekend.  This could be the difference between going to a race or staying home.

The same goes for catering.  Try feeding about 20 team members, family and guests each weekend.  The Nationwide Series isn't like the Cup Series where you can walk over to the catering tent and sit down for a meal.  In the Nationwide garage you may have a concession stand where you can buy nachos and a hot dog and you may not have anything at all.  Our catering deals assure the team that they are going to get breakfast and lunch each day at the track.  Just one less worry for them to think about and a whole lot of convenience for the team, not to mention a few hundred dollars a day we don't have to spend having someone run out to McDonald's or whereever a couple times a day.  Another thing is that race tracks, especially the newer ones like Nashville and Kentucky are about 10 miles from the closest traffic light as far out in the country as you can get.  The reason, plentiful and cheap land, so the trek for breakfast and lunch can sometimes be an hour round trip.

Well, anyway, I ask that if you travel to the race cities where we get hotel and catering support that you patronize these hotels and restaurants and thank them for their support of Herd Racing.  We hope, as our program hopefully grows to full time some day, to keep these relationships going.  You can find all of our sponsors by clicking on the 2010 Sponsors tab on the main home page.  We will update these as they come in througout the year.

Dana Tomes

SATURDAY, MARCH 06, 2010 - I spent most of the day in the office today trying to tie up some loose ends and set some schedules for the next couple weeks.  While there isn't any racing going on in the Nationwide Series again next week, we are still busy getting ready for our next planned race at Nashville.

Morris Van Vleet, who is working with a Camping World Truck Series team in Atlanta this weekend, will be back in the shop this coming week to get the Nashville car prepared.  As we have talked before, most of the big stuff is already done like installing the motor, transmission and such.  But, it needs the setup done and a complete going over before our sponsor event on the 23rd, which is now just over two weeks away.

We have some meetings this week in Mooresville, need to drop off the Daytona backup motor at Mike Ege Racing and there is a race auction in North Carolina on Tuesday evening so at least the first half of the week will be pretty full.  We also are awaiting paint scheme approval for the Nashville entry from NASCAR and hope to have it this coming week and will continue working toward planning our sponsor event on the 23rd.  I met with the caterer, Karen LeGrand, today and we got the menu set for the event.

Hopefully the insurance adjuster will approve the building repairs to the shop door this week so our contractor can get that project underway and over with before we need to begin loading for Nashville.  Not to mention, the Freightliner hauler has to go to the shop Friday to get that transmission issue resolved and a new rear tire.

Lucky there isn't any racing this week because the plate seems pretty full already.

Dana Tomes 

FRIDAY, MARCH 05, 2010 - Herd Racing's Camping World Truck Series simulator will participate in Marshall University's Relay for Life event to help raise funds and awareness for the American Cancer Society.

The Ford F-150 race truck simulator will be at the event from 7 to 8 p.m. on Friday, April 16.  The event will take place on the Buskirk Hall athletic field on the Marshall campus in Huntington, WV.

Students who complete the Relay walk will be able to try their hand at the high banks of Bristol or the superspeedway of Daytona by strapping themselves in the Herd Racing simulator.

If you are in the Huntington area that night stop by and meet some of the team and try your hand at driving on the Camping World Truck circuit.

Dana Tomes 

THURSDAY, MARCH 04, 2010 - I wanted to let everyone know that we are attempting our first push into the social networking world.  Brett Rowe has established a Facebook page and he says, while he is not a computer professional or daily internet surfer, he will attempt to update it as often as possible with some new tidbits of information.  OK, I'll be honest with you.  Someone created the page for Brett and it is likely any and all updates will come from wife Shelley or another member of his household.  But, it will be tidbits of information that Brett likely provides.

I'm not sure how to tell you to get to his Facebook home page because I personally want no part of the Facebook world.  I know so many people who seem to think nothing else in the world is important except Facebook so I have sworn it off.  The reason is I just don't have the time to do anything more than what I am currently doing, and updating a blog on a regular basis, overseeing three company websites, working a full time job, going to church and running a family pretty much take up about 28 hours a day of my time.  Oh yeah, we race every now and again too.

But anyway, if you Facebook, stop by Brett's place and ask him to be your friend or become his friend or do whatever Facebook friends do every day.  Next maybe we'll work on getting Brett to Tweet or Twitter once we fiqure out what exactly that is and determine whether or not it is painful.

On a separate note, Greg Smith is brainstorming our second-floor shop overlook project.  I think we have decided on a corner elevated room that is triangular which will allow you to see the shop floor at an angle from up above.  Nothing like some of the Cup teams have, but if the real things turns out half as nice as the vision then it will be a pretty cool addition.  No reason wasting all that air up there 20 feet above the floor which we don't use.  Will be a nice place to put a couple desks, some files, phones, microwave, refrigerator and that sort of thing so when people are in the shop there will be a nice place to sit and make a phone call.

Also, we are still planning for the car unveiling and sponsor announcement on March 23rd.  Guy at C2C Racing Designs finished up the final paint scheme today so it will go off for NASCAR approval tomorrow.  If you live around the Huntington area I encourage you to come to the event.  We will announce the location next week sometime, but it will feature the car, Brett, some videos, some sponsor handouts and a chance to meet the sponsors who are from the Nashville area.  And did I mention we will have some food!  That's right.  Something like this might even drive Spotter Keith Ross from the backwoods of Wayne County into the city for the evening.  Event will run from 6 to 8 so we hope to see everyone there.

I think our crew chief Chad Beahr may even come over from Mechanicsville, Virginia to be at the event and it is likely that car chief Morris Van Vleet from Mooresville, North Carolina, will be in town that week as well, as we finish up the Nashville car.

I hope to update you some this weekend with some more catering and hotel sponsors that have come aboard over the past week or two.  Talk to you soon.

Dana Tomes

TUESDAY, MARCH 02, 2010 - I just hung up from a conference call with the owners and leaders for the company which we are talking with regarding primary sponsorship for our Nashville entry on April 3.  Things are progressing very well and the company is very excited, as am I, about our relationship and how it can help grow both the sponsor's company and the team.

It looks like we will have a sponsor announcement on March 23.  The location and exact times are still being ironed out.  Plans are for Brett to sign autographs at the event, have the Nashville car in its race paint scheme there for viewing, as well as have new driver hero cards for the event and race.  That's pretty exciting to have two hero card designs for the first two races of the season.

The sponsor is serious about making a splash in Nashville and I suspect we will be doing an event somewhere in the Nashville area while we are in nearby Lebanon for the Nationwide Series race that weekend.  Maybe something on the Friday night before the race at the host hotel.  Not sure yet, but we are working toward doing something for those who attend the race.

I can't say much right now because NASCAR hasn't approved the deal and the paint scheme hasn't been sent to NASCAR for consideration, but I am excited about the direction everything regarding the event and the race are going.  Tonight's call was the best part.  I saw first hand that the company is excited about the opportunity and that makes us want to work that much harder to make them glad they chose motorsports marketing as a way to promote their product.

I am sure to blog more about this whole situation as the event and race draw closer so stay tuned for this good news item.

In other news, Greg and Randy finished up the shop lighting project today and it is pretty bright.  I haven't seen it at night yet, but in the daytime it will definately hurt your eyes.  I think the place will really sparkle once we get the floors painted and sealed and all of the other projects done, like shelving, storage, surface place and other things.

Greg's latest idea is to build a second story office space in the main shop overlooking the shop floor with windows.  I tend to like most of Greg's ideas because to this point they have come with free labor attached to them.  If that holds true on this idea then I think the team will be more than happy to buy the materials if Smith Construction can make it happen!

I joked with Greg today about putting in an aboveground pool for the summer months and turning it into an ice rink in the winter since we haven't seemed to be able to make it as a full time race team.  Randy seemed to like the idea of running the old Citgo Morgan Shepherd go-cart around the 40 by 80-foot main shop floor, but I think Greg is still leaning toward using it as a race shop so I guess we will continue with that idea for the time being.

Now, we just need a handful of volunteers a day or two a week to make some of our dreams become reality.  Once we get some things cleaned up and the weather warms up I will post some photos of the progress.  Based on our luck with the hauler in the shop in the past few months we officially voted today to ban the main hauler from the shop.  We have managed to raise the gate posts into a garage door, into a garage door track and into the front wall during three separate incidents in recent months.  I think the evidence supports today's vote.

Hope to have some more news about the sponsor event to release soon.

Dana Tomes

MONDAY, MARCH 01, 2010 - The braintrust at Smith Construction - namely, Greg and Randy - were in the shop today working on installing new high intensity lighting in the shop bays.  The shop was built in January 2009,  but we never had an opportunity to fully get all of the lighting and wiring done.  In fact, we haven't gotten much of anything done except for piling junk, parts, cars and trucks in various piles.  The biggest piles, the NASCAR Camping World trucks, seem to take up about half of the shop.

Another day of wiring and the lights will be functionable, and based on the early indications we got today, it will be AMAZING when they are done.  With just three of 12 of the high bay lights working today the results were unbelievable.  When all 12 of those lamps are on the shop floor will almost glow it will be so bright.

Once we get this chore behind us the next step is to begin organizing the shop and getting the parts, supplies and such on the shelves and in the cabinets where they belong.  That will go a long way toward helping us be a little more organized.  We have an amazing amount of stuff, tools, parts and the like, but you wouldn't know it based on first glance.  It just looks like piles of junk to the untrained eye.

We hope to get the entire shop floor buffed and sealed this spring and then install an 18,000-pound surface plate we can use for final setup.  We are planning to buy the surface plate from another team out of state and our next challenge will be fiquring out how to load, move 200 miles and then install a nine-ton 12-foot by 24-foot steel plate without meeting up with disaster.  Our track record with that final part has not been good lately.

In fact, I made another call to our building contractor today to see when they will be able to repair the gaping hole in front of the shop.  I failed to mention earlier that while loading up for Daytona last month that I managed to pull the hauler outside while the rear lift gate door was about half way up.  Not a problem if you have a newer style screw-type gate, but our trailer has the older post strap gate where the two posts stick about six feet above the roof of the trailer when the gate is up.  I won't go into detail, but you can imagine what two solid boxed tubing poles sticking up about two feet from a trailer can do to a garage door and front wall when the driver isn't paying attention to what he is doing.  Luckily, the hauler insurance will pay off this time around.

Anyway, we hope to get some things rolling in the shop as the weather begins to break.  It just seems that Spring brings along with it up some enthusiasm and desire to do things outside.  All winter it has just been hard to do much in the shop because of the poor lighting and the cold weather.  A good cleanup and some bright lights will go a long toward helping get the spring back in our step.  We just hope these 35-degree balmy afternoons stick around for a while!

Dana Tomes

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2010 - Herd Racing is setting sights on the Nashville Superspeedway during Easter weekend for our next venture to the track, but we still need some associate sponsorship to make it happen.

We have a primary sponsor on board - which we hope to announce March 23 - but we still need some smaller ones to round out the effort.

Also, committed for the Nashville race is the Holiday Inn Express in downtown Nashville and the Ponderosa Steakhouse in nearby Lebanon.  The crew will stay at the Holiday Inn and the folks at Ponderosa have been kind enough to cater meals to the track for the guys.

If any fan out there knows of a potential Nashville sponsor let us know.  We have a one-page Adobe PDF flyer we can email them that covers the sponsorships we have available.  The prices range from $1,500 up to about $10,000, but I would suspect we could be convinced to take more if someone offered.  All of the packages come with pit passes, pre-race publicity, unlimited access and more.  Just adding a couple $2,500 deals to help with the tires would help a great deal because the Nashville race - being a Nationwide stand alone event - has historically been one of the lowest paying on the schedule.

We are still working on our sponsorship announcement for the March 23 event and are securing a location to have the event.  We know it will be an evening get together with some light finger foods and mingling so our sponsor can introduce our fans and the community to their products.  Nothing fancy, just a chance to show the paint scheme and get to know our sponsor a little better.

While the sponsor will only be on the car for Nashville at this point, they will remain an associate supporter of the team for the entire 2010 campaign.  It also is a new company so our promotion, if effective for them, could lead to quite a nice relationship for both of us.

Dana Tomes

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2010 - Tomorrow the haulers go in at Las Vegas Motor Speedway and Herd Racing would love to have an entry in Week 3 of the 35-race NASCAR Nationwide Series tour.  That was our original plan, running the first five to try to get locked in, but the rain changed that a couple weekends ago in sunny Florida.

While the #75 hauler won't be going in the gate this week, we are there in spirit.

Famous Dave's came on board this week as a team caterer for the Vegas race.  While the #75 team isn't in town, the hospitality will be directed over to the #89 hauler to make sure those guys are fed well during the weekend.  You will see the Famous Dave's logo on Morgan's car this weekend as well.  Likewise, you may have noticed the large green and yellow logo of Felipe's on the #89 car last week at California.  That was the Herd caterer for that race which we also directed over to our sister program.  You can check out our caterers for all the races on the 2010 sponsors page at the top left of the main home page.

While we didn't get to take full advantage of those tradeoff sponsorships this year, we do hope to keep our caterers and lodging providers happy by giving them pit passes and quality attention at the track in hopes that they will be there for us next season should we grow into a full time operation.

On another note, our car chief Morris Van Vleet finished the tear down of the Daytona car today and got the transmission and rear gear back to Gear Guy in Burlington, NC.  He then boarded a jet plane for Vegas to help out Morgan's program this weekend at the track.

Brett went to California last week and Morris is going along this weekend to help make sure the 89 guys have an extra hand during inspection and practice.  I am sure a handful of Herd guys will make the trip to Bristol to help Faith Motorsports if we don't come up with a Bristol entry here in a few weeks.

Hopefully, as we have been talking, we'll be back at Nashville Easter weekend.  Hope to have some news on that front soon.

Dana Tomes

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 2010 - As I mentioned yesterday, Herd Racing is working with an internet click advertising company to help generate a few dollars for the team.

The company, i5, sells internet advertisements to large companies from around the world.  They in turn pay a percentage of the advertising revenue to people who view the ads.  The way I understand it is that you download a toolbar from the company which allows them to send you advertisements.  Every time you click on an ad to view it, you earn a small commission for viewing the ad.  Herd Racing also will earn a small commission for your viewing the ad because you signed up through the Herd Racing program.

It is a multi-level marketing program where you get commission for getting others to look at ads and so on.  The company just launched about a month ago so you probably haven't heard anything about it just yet.

I haven't spent a whole lot of time understanding how it all works, but I have been assured that there is no cost to you to participate and you can remove the toolbar and quit anytime you like.  J.D. Leedy of Motorsports Retro has been managing our account for us and here is what he has to say about what it is and how it works.

From J.D. Leedy of MotorsportsRetro.com:

Join i5 (which stand for Invite 5) with Herd Racing and all your efforts will help fund our race team.  Anyone you know who is on the internet, send them to your link.

Herd Racing already has 16 members below it.  12 direct members, and 4 that those people have invited so far.   The money takes a while to add up and people do have to click for it to work.  But, after some time it will grow.  Be sure to encourage ALL WHO ENROLL to invite (sign up) at least 5 members, and view 5 ads per day.  That is the key....those 2 simple things can add up to a nice income monthly. 

FREE and Easy.  Join invite 5.  Advertising 'by request.'  Provide more value to advertisers and make money.  Simple, FREE, no spyware and remain anonymous.

Invite 5 or 5000.  Create an invite tag to share with contacts from Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc.  Send groups to Join i5 for unlimited income.

For more details, visit my blog at: www.i5motorsports.com.

Join i5 with Herd Racing by going to www.joini5racing.com.

Well, like I said, no pressure from the guys here at Herd Racing if this isn't something you are interested in, but if you are you can click on the i5racing ad on the front page of HerdRacing.com to go to the enrollment website where you can learn more about the program and sign up if you want.

It is simply a company which is paid to get advertisements in front of potential buyers and they are willing to share a small amount of the revenue with you in order to count you as a viewer.  Let us know if you it works for you!

Dana Tomes

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 2010 - Good news for those of you who are wanting a Herd Racing shirt featuring Brett Rowe's signature, an image of the Motorsports Retro car or the 2010 Nationwide Series race schedule.

The Herd Racing internet apparel store is up and running now.  You can click on the Store icon on the left side of the main Herd Racing website homepage to be connected.  It is being hosted and managed by Motorsports Retro.

Like we had said in an earlier blog, not having to deal directly with apparel is the way to go for race teams.  We don't have to take the calls, process the orders, pack the boxes or mail the stuff, not to mention buy the product up front which ties up lots of money.  As you know, our full time office staff is exactly zero right now so anything we can avoid having to do is a positive.

Motorsports Retro has been kind enough to manage the whole program for us.  Granted, our profit margin will be smaller this way, but the earning percentage coming our way will be painless.  Also, the better Motorsports Retro does the better Herd Racing does.  While the team will get a cut of the products sold through the team store, it also will get a cut of the sales at Motorsports Retro in general as part of our sponsorship agreement, so Herd Racing will win on both fronts.

You will see that there is just a bare minimum of products available right now, but you can get about four different designs of t-shirts in two different colors and two different styles.  You also can get sweatshirts, hooded sweatshirts and garments printed front and back.

We will be adding more products as the season goes on so check back often to see when hats, golf shirts and other items will be available.  Remember, a portion of your purchase comes back to the team so make sure your best friend is wearing a Herd Racing shirt this season.  Also, look for designs featuring the Nashville paint scheme in a few weeks.  It will be really sharp!

As for the progress in the shop, Morris got started tearing down the Daytona car today.  The transmission and rear end gear were rentals, as was the backup engine, so those items will go back to their owners this week.  I expect Morris and Brett to be in the shop a couple more days this week working on the small body issues on the Daytona car before we move our attentions to the Nashville car next week.

Also, we have secured an agreement with an internet advertising company that specializes in click ads.  I will be blogging about that topic tomorrow so check back in to see how you can support Herd Racing financially by simply clicking on a few ads each day and providing your opinion of their content.

Dana Tomes

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2010 - Just wanted to let you know that there are about 70 photos from our trip to Daytona on the Herd Racing Daytona photo gallery.  Click on the Photos icon on the bottom left of the home page to access it.  You can enlarge and copy them to your desktop if you want to make yourself a #75 screen saver or some wallpaper.

Rick Adkins went with us to Daytona and took about 200 photos for our use.  We are surely to use a couple in our 2011 team calendar next fall as he got some great shots of the car on the track with the Daytona painted wall in the background.  Krystal Stone also emailed me about 15 that she took during the weekend.  If anyone else has any that they want added to the photo gallery just email me a copy and we will get them on there.

I will talk to my ole buddy Joe Gilley this week and see if he can come up with a Herd Racing Daytona wallpaper that we can put online for fans to download on their computers.  Joe is a graphic artist at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va., and has been our tire guy along with Will Clark since Day One.  Joe was a spotter for Chad Beahr in the former USAR Hooters ProCup Series and spotted for Chad last year in the ARCA Re/Max Series when Chad drove Morgan's old #89 Cup car.

It will be back to the garage this week for Morris.  Brett should fly back in from California tonight where he has been helping Morgan since Thursday, and Morris is driving up from Mooresville tonight so they can get an early start on the Daytona car tomorrow morning.  The car is still on the hauler from our trip back last weekend.  You might wonder why would the hauler still be loaded a week after returning from the race.  Well here's the story.

Our good fortunes, if you dare to call it that, started at the track on Friday night when we were asked by NASCAR to vacate the premises after qualifying was rained out.  The computer on the hauler transmission would not enguage so we couldn't get it in gear.  It finally went in and we got to a local buffet restraurant where we had our team meal before attemping to drive home.  Well, you guessed it, it did it again after dinner and took us until about 11 p.m. to get on the road that night.  This is one of the downsides of an 18-wheeler with an autoshift computerized transmission.

We parked in a truck stop in Georgia to sleep a few hours and it would not go into gear again when we awoke.  It takes about 30 minutes to fiddle with this thing every time this happens.  That was pretty much it.  Hauler driver Dave Thomas said he wasn't taking it out of gear again until we got home.  He didn't either.  We stopped for fuel once and to use the bathroom twice and someone hopped in and held the clutch in each time while Dave visited the restroom.  Saturday evening about 8 p.m. we got home, 24 hours after embarking on our 14-hour mission.

That is when the fun was just getting started.  I told Dave I would drive the hauler up our driveway to the shop because it is a steep gravel road that is very narrow.  I was worried that if something bad happened I would be the only one to blame.  Dave seemed to like the logic since it was pitch black and the ground was covered with snow and ice.  Well, 30 minutes later we were directing traffic as we waited on the wrecker company and fire department to come get us out of the ditch.  You guessed it.  We hit some West Virginia ice while making the turn into the driveway and skidded right into the ditch.  About 11 p.m. we finally made it most of the way up the driveway and hit ice again and came to a stop.  We left the truck and trailer there to deal with on Sunday.

Sunday came and my hour or so of messing with it after church got me about 10 feet back down the hill and into another ditch.  I should have known that nothing good would come from attemping to work on Sunday as the Bible says.  But God said in the scripture that it is OK to get your oxen out of the ditch on the Sabbath for as long as you don't plan on working on that day.  That was exactly what I was doing.  My oxen was in the ditch and things only seemed to get worse the more I tried to get him out.

More snow and ice fell each day until Wednesday when we hooked two more trucks to the hauler and put snow chains on it.  An hour or so later we had burned black marks everywhere and chunked off part of a rear tire on the hauler and hadn't moved six inches.  We threw in the towel until Friday when a heat wave of 40 degrees came through and we were able to get a wrecker in to finish the job once more.

So, it wasn't like we were dragging our feet on unloading the hauler.  We just spent a week doing what should have taken us five minutes to do.  Hopefully this week will be much more productive.  I am staying far away in the morning when they unload the car.  Not sure what might happen next.  Stay tuned!

Dana Tomes 

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2010 - Fans may wonder why Herd Racing's entries always carry that little round yellow circular logo about half way down the B posts.  Well, here's a little information about the how and why of that logo.

The yellow logo is for the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, a national organization that provides a fraternity of sorts for students in middle school, high school and college, and allows students to interact with other young Christians.  You don't have to be a Christian to join FCA, but my experience has been that most are and those who aren't typically don't stay that way for long.  You don't have to be an athlete either, but most do seem to be interested in sports in some fashion.

I am a member of the FCA's adult huddle, a group of businesspeople who gather for lunch regularly to talk about fundraising, planning and other ways to help make sure our local FCA chapters are strong and are functioning the way they should.  We also speak occasionally to students on the high school or college level about faith-related topics that apply to sports.  FCA is a great way to get God back in the schools.

To help raise awareness for the organization, www.fca.org, Herd Racing runs the group's logos on our cars each and every week, hoping that someone at the track, in the stands or at home watching television will inquire about the group and desire to become part of what FCA is all about.  Who knows, maybe someday a donor will come along and that big yellow circle will be on the hood!

Our goal that when the Herd Racing program is up and running on all cylinders that our Herd Racing Foundation can make a difference for FCA and other similar groups.  The goal is for Herd Racing to donate 10% of its race winnings to the Herd Racing Foundation, which will be set up as a non-profit charitable organzation.  The Foundation will then coordinate events and disperse these funds to various organizations and groups which display the core values and thinking of the team.  We want to promote "Faith" and "Family" and will support organizations who are focused on those two core values.

If you think about it, a race car in the Nationwide Series could make in excess of a million dollars a year in winnings.  That would be $100,000 going to the Foundation for the betterment of our communities.  That is our goal.  To be able to give back to the programs across the country that really could use our help.  We aren't ashamed to say that God is real and should be a important part of your life.  We desire to support organizations who also believe the Lord should be number one in everyone's life.  This isn't to say that a charity has to be faith-based to receive funding, but their cause must have something to do with promoting either faith or family values to our youth.

I mention this just to make a point.  I really believe Herd Racing could be a great asset to a corporate sponsor.  We aren't looking for multi-millions like many of the mega teams demand.  We aren't interested in having the most up to date corporate jet or fanciest motorcoach.  We simply desire to race competitively, diplay integrity and honesty in all we do, and give back to the community a portion of what we receive so that goodness can be shared with others.  I think that is how God directs us to live our lives, as individuals and as businesspersons.

I would think that this would be the type of behavior that a potential sponsor would admire and desire to get involved with.  I think it is, but we just have to find that one, or two, or three companies out there who have the desire to promote their products or services through racing, have a reputable product our team can feel good about supporting, and have the desire to associate with a team which isn't afraid to stand up for what it believes is the right way to do business - at home and at the track.

Dana Tomes

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2010 - We are continuing to work toward the goal of being back on the track at Nashville in Race #5 of the 2010 NASCAR Nationwide Series.  Should that thought continue to progress as scheduled we will be hosting a sponsorship announcement on Tuesday, March 23 in Huntington, WV.  More information on that event will come as it is finalized.

We still need associate sponsorship for Nashville.  We likely will have a primary sponsor, as well as a hotel sponsor and caterer, but we need a few more associate partners to help with tires, travel, entry fees and that sort of thing.  If you know of any business out there who might be interested, please have them contact us online at info@herdracing.com or call us at 877-736-7303.

We can offer some great prices for sponsorship that include grandstand tickets, pit passes, dinner with the team and other perks.  Prices for associate sponsorship start at just $2,500 which includes two pit passes, so pass the word to anyone you think might be interested.  Getting your name on a NASCAR race car for $2,500 and getting access to the pits was unheard of a couple years ago.  The faultering U.S. economy has really humbled the sport - and most all of us for that matter.

The Nashville car will be the Chevy Impala SS and it will have an Earnhardt-Childress Racing engine so we should be pretty good on power and the body on the car is new so we should have a pretty good shot at making the field there.  The car will be white in color.

Thanks for following the team on the blog.  Hope to have some more to discuss with you soon.

Dana Tomes

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 2010 - Our driver Brett Rowe will be unveiling his new driver website in the coming weeks.  You can sneak a peak at the site's main home page now by logging on to www.brettroweracing.com.

It will be a couple weeks before the whole site is functionable, but I think fans of Brett and Herd Racing will like it.  It will have interactive Fan Zone stuff, a driver store where you can buy Brett's personal line of apparel, and it will be a good supplement to our Herd Racing site.  We are trying to set it up to include things that our team site doesn't have so both sites compliment and link to one another, but aren't just the same old information.

The more sites and stuff we have out there the better chance we have of landing a sponsor.  Shannon Feldmann, our PR person in Concord, NC, is also working with Brett to set him up on Facebook, Twitter and those type things as well.  Once all of that stuff is up and running we will provide links from the Herd Racing site so you can follow Brett.

Brett will be in California this weekend even though we are not entering the #75 car.  He has a meeting with a potential media partner and will hang around Fontana and help Morgan Shepherd's team during the weekend after his meetings.

One of our goals right now is to generate interest in Brett and the team so if you are out there on the web in chat rooms, Marshall fan forums and the like, remember to mention the team and website address so some of those fans will begin to visit us as well.  We have website tracking capabilities and can track how many fans visit our site each day and where they come from.  We also are getting some potential sponsors who are wanting information as to the number of fans we have, how many web hits we get per day, and the like, so the more people you can drive to the site the better.

I talked with Brett today and it looks like Nashville will be our next attempt, followed by Talladega.  Both of these races are in April.

Keep checking back for some more information on the team's progress.

Dana Tomes

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 2010 - Although our trip to Daytona last week fell short of our expectations, things are continuing to progress daily on the home front.

We got an email today from a company which is interested in associate sponsorship.  I am hoping to talk with them by phone tomorrow and look forward to having an opportunity to work with them to help take their marketing efforts to the next level.

We also got an email today from a local catering company which is interested in partnering with Herd Racing to travel to some of the races with us and cook for us right there in the hauler.  As you have probably seen in the 2010 sponsor pages on the main website, we try to secure hotel rooms and catering services for each race we go to.  That just relieves the stress of trying to round up groceries and fix a couple meals each day and allows us to focus on the more important issues at hand while allowing a local restaurant or caterer to receive the NASCAR experience first hand and promote their business to others.

Dave Ball, who owns Bon Appetit in Huntington, WV, is a NASCAR fan and we are working on his company becoming a supporting sponsor and catering a few events for us in 2010.  If you want to drop Dave a note and thank him for his willingness to help the team you can visit his website at www.cookin4u.biz and click on his name under his contact page.  We haven't worked out the details or the particular races yet but our convensations today were very positive.

We also are working on scheduling a sponsorship announcement event for March 23 somewhere locally to announce our primary sponsor and unveil the car paint scheme for the April 2 Nashville race.  I can't say a whole lot right now because the approvals from NASCAR have not been secured, but I can say it is a profit-sharing opportunity whereby the team will receive a portion of the proceeds that the sponsoring company makes as a result of its association with Herd Racing.

That being said, I hope you will support them with your business or at least tell your friends about them.  We will have several of these type sponsors this year.  Our deal with Daytona sponsor MotorsportsRetro was a similar agreement.  The team receives a portion of the company's sales so if you or any friends are into anything retro then click on the banner ad on the Herd Racing website to go to their online store.  Their Herd Racing store will be up soon and they have a real cool drawing of the #75 car on their website header.  In their Herd Racing store you will be able to buy various styles of shirts, hats, and other clothing and they will feature all of our 2010 paint schemes on shirts so you can collect them all.

I really believe this team could compete week in and week out if there was some sponsorship behind it.  Of course, that is what every NASCAR team will say.  But I do think we have the people and basic equipment to run decent on a minimal budget.  Brett and the guys showed that at Montreal last August.  Finishing 21st in the biggest road race on the Nationwide schedule with a rag-tag band of hillbillies as a pit crew is pretty impressive to me.

We will be adding supporting, hotel and catering sponsors in the next several days so please check back to see what is going on regularly.  It always helps to let sponsors know that you as a fan appreciate their support of the team.  Sometimes just getting an email from a fan is the deciding factor for a sponsor.  I hope you will let Dave Ball at Bon Appetit that you are pleased he has chosen to work with the team in 2010.

Talk to you soon.

Dana Tomes

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2010 - I just wanted to pass along a formal "thank you" to everyone who played any role in helping us make it to Daytona and back last week.  While the results were not what we expected or hoped for, we were one of just 57 race teams in the world who were able to be part of the whole Daytona Nationwide experience.

First of all I would like to thank everyone on the team.  Brett, Brian, Kenny, Mafia, Mafia Jr., Keith, Joe, Will, Chad, Morris, Shannon, Mike, Big Dave, Greg and Krystal did everything asked of them and I appreciate it.  Then there is Brett's family, wife Shelley, mom and dad, Ronnie and Loretta, uncle Randy, aunt Marcella and cousin Jared, not to mention Paul back at Imperial Bedding who helped with some decals.

A lot of people put time and efforts into making a team successful.  We had Guy at C2C, Eric and John at Amtek Signs, Roger and Karen LeGrand, Sterling, Millard, Hubert, Ed and Randy at ECO-FIRST, Isaiah and his family at the Streamline Hotel and Wiggins Family Recipe who catered our food at the track.

Then there was Rick Adkins, our photographer, J.D. Leedy of Motorsports Retro, and our good friends Barbara Matzelle and Shannon Smith who went to bat for the Halifax Humane Society.  Speaking of that, be sure to check out the story and photo posted on the shelter's website, www.halifaxhumanesociety.org.  It is something you will want to take a look at.  Barbara is a true friend of racing - and animals - and will go down as being the first sponsor of 2010 who signed on to help get the Herd to the track.  Thanks Barbara!

As you can see, it takes quite a few people in various positions to make everything happen.  What makes it extra special is that Herd Racing was able to make a solid showing at one of the biggest events of the year with just two paid employees.  That's right.  Other than Shannon Feldmann and Morris Van Vleet, everyone else is volunteer help!

And, even after the #75 car got sent home when qualifying was rained out, it was satisfying to see Brett, Brian, Kenny and Mafia stick around on Saturday and help pit Morgan Shepherd's #89 Chevrolet to a 22nd place finish in the race.  That's what Christian people do and it is nice to be associated with so many people like that who will lend a hand where needed who are happy to give where they can.

Well, spirits are little better today.  If we can get a little sponsor infusion between now and mid March it looks like we will shoot for entering the Nashville events on April 2.  Brett will be traveling to California this week to help Morgan's program, so while he won't be in the driver's seat, he will be at the track.

Thanks to anyone who I may have overlooked.  You are important to the program and your contribution is greatly appreciated!

Dana Tomes

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2010 - I will start by apologizing that you were kept completely in the dark for nearly a week.  Our internet network card couldn't find a network to connect to at the track in Daytona so we didn't have any way to upload photos, update the blog and the like.  So, I will spend the next several days hitting on some things that stuck in our memory during our trip to Speedweeks.  I will try to address a separate topic each night.

First of all, as you probably know by now, the #75 Herd Racing Dodge Charger didn't make the field.  It rained on qualifying day and the field was set by NASCAR using a variety of rules.  Needless to say, regardless of how they shook up the cards we got the bad hand each and every time.  Our only hope of racing in the Nationwide Series opener on Saturday was for the sun to have been bright on Friday afternoon.  As you know, a storm system dumped about an inch of rain on the track all day on Friday, causing the qualifying session and the Camping World Truck race that evening to be rained out.

Here is how the field was set.  The first 30 starters were set by their 2009 owners points.  They were all full time teams last year and earned those spots, in my opinion.  Tony Stewart started 31st by being the winner of last year's event.  OK by me.  Greg Biffle started 32nd by winning at Las Vegas last year.  That that one I had to raise an eybrow on.  You get to race at Daytona simply because you won a race somewhere else the previous year?  Oh, well.  Let's keep going.  Jeff Green started 33rd because he was a past Busch Series champion.  I can live with that one as well.

The 34th through 43rd starters were set based on what number of tab their crew chief drew the previous day to decide Friday's qualifying order.  Unfortunately, we drew 51st out of 57 cards.  This is where I really felt we didn't get a fair shake.  Starting the most important race of the year based on the luck of the draw?  Seemed to me that a sport as big as NASCAR should have a little more fair and equitable way of determining the starting field, but as we all know, I wasn't consulted even once when the 2010 NASCAR rule book was being put together so that I could voice my opinions.

Not to say had we had qualifying that we would have made the race.  We were near the back of the pack in both qualifying sessions and only got on the track for a handful of laps because of 57 cars going through inspection.  That's a gripe for another blog entry that we will get to later.  I knew after first practice that our chances were not good at racing on Satuday.  We had some performance issues with the car that were going to take a few practices to sort out.

You know, had we have been given the opportunity to have attempted to qualify and not have made the field I wouldn't have anyone to blame but ourselves.  But, driving home 800 miles after four days at the track and months in the shop after being told that we drew the wrong tab is hard to swallow.  This is racing, not a chance at a pull tab at a local Bingo game!  There has to be a better way to determine who races and who doesn't when this decision costs each team at least $50,000.

Needless to say, we aren't able to go to California this week because of financing.  We needed that $50,000 check from Daytona's winnings to pay for the upcoming two west coast races.  We really hoped to run the whole 35-race schedule, and at least the first five to see if we could have gotten in the Top 30 in points.  But, investing all you can find from sponsors and others into Daytona and then not making the field puts the brakes on doing anything until some more help comes along or we can slowly dig out of the money pit we have dug for ourselves.  NASCAR racing isn't for the poor and we found that out a day before the season even started.

Have you ever been in one of those situations where you just knew for whatever reason that success wasn't meant to be?  That's kind of the way the team felt in Daytona.  We couldn't get the engine RPMs up to where we needed them to build the speed we needed.  We got very little practice time due to the long inspection lines so we didn't have much time to fix what was wrong.  Then the rains and the drama that sent us packing.  Made that 16-hour ride home a long one.

Had I had my druthers I wish NASCAR would have let the 27 non-Top 30 cars earn their fate during an abbreviated qualifying session on Saturday morning.  There was time to do it and I think that would have let everyone earn their place on the track or on the hauler heading for the Turn 4 gate.  Sort of a put up or shut up scenario.  If we were slow then we were slow.  I just wish we could have had some part in determining our own destiny.

I won't even get into the dealings where after the race field was set by NASCAR on Friday night that the 43rd qualifier mysteriously withdrew from the race after they were guaranteed to start and earn at least $50K.  Amazingly, the teams which drew 44th, 45th, 46th and 47th, who each would have moved up a spot and into the starting field, decided to not accept the free pass into the race and they withdrew as well.  Amazingly, the well-funded team with a big-time Cup driver which drew 48th moved up five positions to start the race.  "Will that be check or cash?" I am sure the five withdrawing owners said as they packed up for home.

Well, enough grumbling for today.  I am sure you get the feeling that I am pretty bummed out about the whole adventure.  I just need to be big enough to admit what happened.  We were simply the victim of circumstances.  No one to blame but the rain.

Dana Tomes

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 07, 2010 - The last full day before heading south was enjoyable.  You could see that the hard work is beginning to pay off and everything was laid back and the guys were joking and not feeling the pressure at all.

There was a half dozen or more in Brett's shop all afternoon decaling the car, wiping out the interior and doing a final nut and bolt check before draining the water from engine and radiator.  Temperatures will be about 25 degrees when we leave tomorrow and I am not sure what the weather is further south so we aren't taking any chances with the motor.

My wife Tonya finished up the uniforms and pit crew suit washing after church this afternoon.  I finished ironing on the the Nationwide patches and got everything hung up it the hauler closets.  We went ahead and packed the cooler with drinks this afternoon too.  Not to keep them cold, but to keep them from freezing.  We're hoping the cooler will keep the cold air out, rather than in.

I will spend the morning tomorrow running errands, banking, mailing, and the usual Monday chores before pulling the hauler and RV out for a wash job.  At times like this it pays to own a pressure washing company.  Millard Ryder and Ed Miller, our primary industrial cleaners at ECO-FIRST, will wash the hauler and RV from top to bottom and get them ready tomorrow afternoon.  Dave Thomas, our hauler driver, will arrive from Nashville around 2 and our photographer, Rick Adkins, will be off work at 4:30.  Even J.D. Leedy, the president of Motorsports Retro, our sponsor, is going to ride along in the hauler to get the full team experience.

My friends, Roger and Karen LeGrand, delivered a big bag of brownies this evening for our trip tomorrow.  Both are avid race fans and have helped us since the beginning in one way or another.  Roger, who was our tire guy on Morgan's Cup Car back in 2006, also helped prep Chad Beahr's ARCA car last summer.  Karen, who does whatever you need, can cook about anything.  You won't starve when she's at the track with you.

Greg Smith and his son helped with wiping the car down and putting decals on, as did Brett's brother Brian.  We always leave the hood logos for Brian.  Big decals are intimidating because one wrong stick and you are out a day and a couple hundred bucks.  Brian attacks those hood decals like he's putting out a fire.

I also talked to Morgan for quite a while this evening as he got on the road for Daytona.  He was sitting down to eat at a Texas Roadhouse in South Carolina.  His hauler had already made it to Georgia.  Morgan's friend, Ken Lanter, always loans the team his condo in Florida for the Daytona race week so Morgan and the crew always like to try to get down a day or two early to try to get a day of rest in before hitting the track.  The fact that the Faith guys got the car done and were able to leave early is a great sign.

It will be nice for both the Herd guys and the Faith boys to be working together again.  It's fun at the track.  Being sister programs it is really enjoyable to go from hauler to hauler and make it successful by working together.  Regardless whose company name is on the paycheck, both teams are really just one and both share a complete open book with the other so we know where we are strong and where we are lacking in about everything we do.  I am sure a lot of the other teams are confused when they see a Herd Racing guy under Morgan's hood and a Faith Motorsports guy pushing a Herd car through templates, but when the mission of both programs is serving the Lord then working side by side is almost natural.  I guess the easiest way to explain it is that Herd Racing is the AAA affiliate of Faith Motorsports and both just rotate the players to where they are needed.

Hopefully we get the internet service issues worked out for the road and I can post regularly from Daytona.  If you don't hear anything for a day or two rest assured that we are on the journey south and will check in when we get settled in.

Dana Tomes

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 06, 2010 - In less than 48 hours we will be on the road for Daytona.  Wow, that off season - if you can really call it that - really flew by.  I think many in the sport wishes NASCAR was a little more like a traditional stick and ball sport which plays hard for about 5-6 months and then is off at least an equal amount of time.  I know most fans wouldn't like that very much, but those poor people who travel with the circuit for 35-36 weeks a year sure would like to see it cut back a little.

Oh well, Greg Smith and I spent our morning in the shop working on pre-load.  Greg finished up some wiring in the hauler so we won't have to run extension cords to power our hot plates and food warmers, while I began packing up the pit crew stuff, Windexing the helmets, sorting shoes and gloves and tracking down the flame retardant hoods and aprons.  Isn't is amazing that even though everything has it own place on the hauler that you still can't seem to keep track of anything.  Seems we lost three $80 crew shirts at Montreal and a pit crew helmet.  One pit box I cleaned out today looking for the missing pit crew helmet turned up to contain a helmet.  Problem was it wasn't our's.  So I guess someone who may have helped out on the crew last year took ours and left us theirs.  In addition they left a belt, gloves and a Dodge Mopar pit road coat from the Canadian Tire Series.  Guess we picked that up in Montreal, even though we didn't use any pit help that weekend.  Puzzling, isn't it.  Not sure what we lost to get it, but I guess I will be spending a few hours on the internet when we get back from Daytona figuring out who it belongs to and how to get it back to them.

Brett and Morris finished up the setup on the car this morning as well.  I assume Morris will probably go back home to Mooresville tomorrow morning for a couple days off before leaving out for Florida on Tuesday. Now all the car lacks is a few decals and a coat of wax.  We will do that Sunday afternoon after church and lunch.

Come Monday morning we will do a maintenance check on the semi, hook to the hauler and pull it outside.  All that will remain is the loading of the car and pit boxes.  Barring any disasters, which we are usually unable to do, we should be on the road by 4 p.m. on Monday.

I wish we had another week or two to prepare, but I think just about everything we can do has been done.  All that remains is a dreaded 800-mile journey.  Hopefully we can get to Mooresville, NC, before late night Monday and pick up our backup engine from Mike Ege Racing.  We will then pick out a nice rest area in South Carolina for the overnight campout.  After a 4-6 hour nap I hope we can arrive at the track by the 3 p.m. check-in time.  Haulers will enter DIS at 5 p.m. Tuesday.

Talk to you tomorrow night.

Dana Tomes

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 2010 - Well, we're getting hammered by another snowstorm here in the mountains of Appalachia again this weekend.  A very chilly rain fell all day today, turning to snow tonight, and the weathercasters say anywhere from 4 inches to more will fall tonight.  Not a pleasant thing to deal with when you are trying to make the most of your time getting ready to leave for the track on Monday.

Worked most all day today in the shop.  Sterling Ayers at ECO-FIRST spent the day doing some paint work on the hauler, Greg Smith of Smith Construction who serves are our tire carrier, spent the day on the inside of the trailer setting up tables, securing shelves, doing a little wiring and just getting the winter bugs worked out before we leave.

There is still a bunch to do like cleaning up four or five sets of wheels, finishing the setup and decaling of the car, some patch sewing on the pit crew uniforms and my dear wife Tonya is spending her weekend washing crew shirts, pit suits and the like in preparation for our Monday afternoon departure.

A lot of interesting things are going to happen at Daytona.  One is that Brett will have a new driver post card for the fans at this year's season-opener.  We are printing 500 limited edition hero cards in the Motorsports Retro theme for the race.  With that few in print I am confident there will be more demand than there is supply, but we are planning so many different paint schemes this year that we didn't want to settle on just one hero card for the whole season.  I hope we can keep Chad's presses at Fidelity Printing rolling every couple of weeks with some new ones.  JD and the guys at MotorsportsRetro will have some copies so if you don't pick up one at the track or at the Streamline Hotel where the crew is staying then there is one last way to snag one.  Make a purchase at MotorsportsRetro.com before, during or after the Daytona race and JD will throw one in with your order.

Another interesting bit of news is that our dear friend Barbara Matzelle who lives in Charleston, S.C., and is the mother of our shock specialist Mike Matzelle, is sharing her love of pets with the team at Daytona.  Believe it or not, Barbara is securing sponsorship for the Halifax Humane Society of Daytona Beach on our car.  Barbara is donating the sponsorship on the #75's TV panel in memory of her dog, Jessie, who passed away.  The ladies at the Humane Society are tickled to death to get such a nice placement on the car, and Barbara has worked through the team to get a couple passes so two of the shelter's employees can come to the race, get their photo made with Brett and the car, and promote their cause.  It leaves a good feeling when someone steps out and supports a non-profit organization like Barbara is doing at Daytona.  The exposure the Halifax Humane Society will get from this Daytona race weekend will be priceless.  I am sure the feeling Barbara takes home to South Carolina after watching her dog Jessie's name ride around on that race car will be worth it as well.

We are working with our webmaster to set up a photo gallery page where we can upload photos from the track next week. Rick Adkins, a professional photographer, is making the trip with us so we should have plenty of photos to share once we work out the upload.  Hopefully we will get it all going before we leave on Monday.

Dana Tomes  

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 04, 2010 - Herd Racing is proud to announce today that MotorsportsRetro.com has joined the team as primary sponsor at Daytona next weekend.

More good news is that the company will create a Herd Racing apparel store and manage that program for us, including sales, shipping, trackside merchandise, etc. with a percentage of the sales coming back to the team.  Having a company manage merchandise is huge, especially for a small start-up team like ours.  That means the fans get more choices of product and the team doesn't have the up front expenses to create the inventory of shirts, hats, jackets, etc.

J.D. Leedy, president of MotorsportsRetro.com, said his company is happy to become part of the Herd Racing program and market its products through the team and it's driver, Brett Rowe.

"Herd Racing and Brett Rowe exemplify the credibility and professionalism that we were looking for," Leedy said.  "We are looking forward to kicking off our vintage and retro race apparel line as a partner of Herd Racing."

Fans can order apparel featuring vintage and defunct racing logos from the past by contacting the company online at www.motorsportsretro.com.

Joining MotorsportsRetro.com as associate sponsors of the #75 Herd Racing entry at Daytona are Imperial Bedding Company (www.imperialbedding.com), the Halifax Humane Society (www.halifaxhumanesociety.org), the Streamline Hotel (www.streamlinehotel.com), Wiggin's Family Recipe, SportsRetro.com (www.sportsretro.com), ECO-FIRST (www.eco-first.com), Coast 2 Coast Racing Designs (www.c2cracingdesigns.com), and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes (www.fca.org).

More news to come tomorrow on sponsorship details for Daytona, but as you can see, things are off to a great start in 2010!

Stay tuned for more updates as we count down the days to Daytona.

Dana Tomes

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 03, 2010 - I got a pleasant suprise this evening when I got home from church.  John Stingel, owner of Amtek Signs in Salem, Indiana, had sent me an email earlier in the day wanting to help the team with vinyl lettering and signage.

I have known John for a handful of years now, first meeting him when he reached out in 2006 to volunteer to help the Faith Motorsports program with vinyl lettering.  John and his company have provided decals free of charge to Morgan's team ever since and it has been a blessing.  Today's gesture to begin helping Herd was also a great blessing.

John has always been a supporter of Herd Racing.  In fact, he wrapped our show car hauler a couple years ago for the cost of the wrap.  When such a wrap would have cost probably $5,000 or more anywhere else I was really excited when he offered to do it for cost.

The fact that he reached out today was a happy moment for us as well.  While I'm sure he won't be able to match the deal he does for Morgan's program, I am still grateful for any discounts or special treatment I am sure he will provide.  If you don't know much about vehicle wrapping and vinyl cut decals, they aren't cheap.  A typical race team spends between $500 and $3,000 a week for lettering, depending on whether it is a paint and vinyl paint scheme or a full wrap.

John and Amtek are just the latest of a long list of companies that have reached out to help.  The company where I earn my living, ECO-FIRST, has come on board to help, as has Fidelity Printing who does our envelopes, hero cards, posters and such.  Sports Retro has joined us as our apparel provider and our team will be sporting t-shirts and sweatshirts at Daytona compliments of that agreement.

In addition, hotels and restaurants in many of the cities we will be visiting are jumping aboard to provide lodging or catering services to the team.  One thing I can say is our guys will have a decent bed and some good food every weekend, which hasn't always been the case with small budget teams in NASCAR.

I remember our first race with Faith Motorsports in Nextel Cup in August 2006 at Bristol.  I spent the weekend in an old pull camper on the drag strip parking lot with no electricity and it was about 100 degrees that weekend.  Our old friend Jim Graham, who chiefed Morgan's crew that first fall, was crammed in another rental RV in a restaurant parking lot about 10 minutes from the track.  Their rental RV had no bathroom and no linens so they were worse off than me and my guys were.

You know, it was pretty miserable as I sit here thinking about it, but things have come a long way from that weekend.  Morgan's group is typically in a pretty nice hotel these days and Mrs. Cindy always makes sure the boys are well fed.

Things on the Herd front look pretty good in that respect as well.  Compliments of the Streamline Hotel, the birthplace of NASCAR, the Herd guys will sleep good in Daytona.  And, Wiggins Family Recipe will be carting the meals to the track twice a day so the fellas will be nourished as well.

Just a week from today and first practice will be in the books.  Time flies when you are having fun!

Dana Tomes

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 02, 2010 - We are hoping to hear back from NASCAR in the next couple of days about our proposed paint scheme for Daytona.  The car will be metalic silver with black and red lettering, and of course, chrome wheels, a Herd Racing trademark.

Our paint scheme artist, Guy Driggers of Coast 2 Coast Racing Designs, has provided us with the attached photo of the car under cover as we wait for word on when the real images can be released.  Guy's company came on board with us about a month ago and I honestly can say that his paint scheme designs and computer renderings of cars are the best I have ever seen in NASCAR.  You can hardly tell that his drawings are not the real car.  You'll see what I mean in a day or two when we release the art for the Daytona car.

Well, while we're on the topic of Daytona.  The car is about ready for final decals and cleaning.  We can't wait to get to the track and see how we stack up against the competition.  We should be toward the top of the heap when it comes to motors.  We purchased our restrictor plate Dodge engine from Mike Ege Racing Engines.  For those of you who know Dodge, you know that Mike Ege was the chief engine builder at Evernham Racing and it was his designs and engines that powered Everham equipment when they were a Dodge team.

We have spared no expense on this speedway car and I really hope it pays off for us.  We have acquired the best gears, transmission, oils, engine, and some other speciality parts that help make the car go faster.  Of course, we won't know if it was money well spent until next Friday afternoon when qualifying concludes, but I feel more confident going into it than I would have if we had not went the route we did.  At least, make it or not next Friday, we can say we gave it all we had.

Stay tuned for that paint scheme and sponsorship announcements later this week!

Dana Tomes

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 2010 - Herd Racing's effort at Daytona will be almost like a reunion of Morgan Shepherd's Faith Motorsports crews of yesteryear as so many of the former Faith team members have remained friends long after their days with the mostly volunteer crew have passed.

It starts with myself.  While I still serve as Morgan's partner in Faith Motorsports and have a burning desire to see that program succeed, so many of others who make up the Herd collection also have had ties to Morgan and his #89 program.

Let's go through the list.  Brett Rowe, our driver, has volunteered to help Shepherd on many occasions over the past couple of seasons and has been a regular attendee at Shepherd's annual charitable fund mission trip each December.

Crew chief Chad Beahr, who drove the first and only Faith Motorsports Cup car in the ARCA Series for Herd last summer, formerly served as Morgan's crew boss back in 2007.

Then there is Herd car chief Morris Van Vleet.  He headed Shepherd's crew in 2008 and much of the 2009 Nationwide Series campaign.

It's kind of funny that Herd's whole upper level of management passed through Shepherd's program at one point or another and they all ended up the best of friends and still together.  I think that means something.  Racing can make friendships that last.  Months may go by without us seeing one another, but we still talk on the phone, email and talk about the next time we are going to be together.  That's fun.  Knowing God can allow you to appreciate simple friendships sometimes.

Then there's the crew.  Hauler driver Dave Thomas of Lebanon, Tennessee, drove Shepherd's hauler the first year Faith started racing back in 2006.  Joe Gilley was Morgan's tire man for much of 2007 and now he manages the tire program at Herd.

Charleston, South Carolina native Mike Matzelle will serve as Herd's shock specialist at Daytona.  He too was a fabricator and shock man for Morgan back in 2008.  Shannon Feldmann, Morgan's office gal and media person last year, has also landed at Herd Racing in the off season.  Shannon manages our PR now and takes good care of our travel arrangements, hotels and food.

The weird thing is that the coming together of this bunch to form a team is almost like it is something that was supposed to happen.  When Herd Racing started coming together with the Marshall University theme car back in 2008 we didn't really even have to look for anyone.  It seemed like people just showed up and they were the exact people who we needed and they fit in perfectly.

It seems like all of the pieces of the puzzle are just about in place.  I guess we'll see in a week or so how they all fit together. 

But regardless of whether the #75 car is in the big race at Daytona on February 13th or not, there is a couple things that are bound to happen.  Everyone will have a great time being together again, everyone will joke and cut up with one another, and everyone will leave the track on Valentine's morning with a smile.

That's what racing is suppoed to be like and I am glad we have been able to put together a program where the good ole days are still alive and well.

Dana Tomes

SUNDAY, JANUARY 31, 1010 -- Did you ever wonder why practically every race team is located within 10 miles of the small city of Mooresville, NC?  Well, I have no idea why they located there to begin with, but I sure know why they stay there - parts.

Running a NASCAR team from the great state of West Virginia looks like a good idea on the surface.  Cheap rent, inexpensive people, less stress, and on and on.  The downside, as we have quickly found out, is trying to locate a race part when you need it.

That's what happened Friday as the shop guys were finishing up the Daytona car.  We needed a couple size 16 AN stainless oil lines.  Oh, we made an attempt, NAPA, Advance, AutoZone and a handful of other speciality automotive stores, but something as common as a simple one-inch hose with aluminum fittings couldn't be found within a 100 mile radius.

So, Brett placed an overnight Saturday delivery order from a Mooresville parts house and then we get a snow storm on Saturday morning and UPS can't get the order to us.  Now our Friday issue is going to drag into Monday.  Luckily, it didn't keep Saturday and Sunday from being productive.

Not to mention that on Tuesday I will make my fourth trip in the past month to Mooresville to pick up what seems like a whole truck load of last-minute items, including our backup restrictor plate motor for Daytona, a restrictor-plate carberator, some hoses, belts, specialty fittings, and more.  We probably won't need anything else until at least 10 minutes after I get back.

Well, the good news is that we now have just about every part needed to get the Daytona car off of the scales and into the hauler.  Morris and Brett spent a few hours after church today in the shop working on window bracing, tying up hoses and wires and a few touchup things like that, but overall, the car is pretty much ready to go.

The bad news is that we talked about our plans for the races after Daytona and realize that the we don't have near the turnaround time we would like between races to get cars readied.  In fact, from the time we get home from Daytona on February 14 we will have about 40 hours before the hauler will have to be on the road for Fontana early Tuesday morning.  Fortunately, the California car we plan to use if we make the trip out west, is about 90 percent ready to go.  All it needs is a few parts we stole off it for the Daytona car put back and the final setup and coil binding done.  If we decide to go to California we will run the same car the following week at Las Vegas unless bad luck strikes us.

We should have some sponsorship information to announce this coming week.  I met with a sponsor in Cincinnati on Friday and have sent the proposed Daytona paint scheme to NASCAR for approval.  If everything goes well we should have some news to let out in the next couple of days.  I can say at this point that I think the Daytona car's paint scheme is going to look pretty awesome.  I can't wait to show it off.

Dana Tomes

SATURDAY, JANUARY 30, 2010 -- Welcome to the Herd Racing 2010 NASCAR Nationwide Series blog.  We'll post here on a regular basis during the 2010 race season to try to give you a feel for what is happening behind the scenes and provide a little more than what you might read on the mainstream racing websites.

I for one, am not a Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, UTube, etc. kind of person.  I will do good to get this blog thing mastered during the year, but if you want up to date information about the team, driver, crew, sponsors, etc. during the year then this will likely have the most up to date stuff out there.

Let's get started.  As you have probably seen on Jayski, The Hot Lap and other popular NASCAR sites, Brett Rowe will again be the primary driver in our program this year.  Brett lives about 10 miles from our shop here in snowy West Virginia and is a perfect fit for us.  He holds the same values as our team ownership and is someone who we have found is great to work with.  Brett has great family support and it is fun to watch his parents, bother, wife, kids and others get behind him.  There aren't too many West Virginians who get the chance to race at this level and we are all thrilled that Brett is our guy.

Chad Beahr will be our crew chief in 2010.  Chad, who drove for Herd in the ARCA Re/Max Series last year at Pocono, is a race driver at heart, but like anyone else involved in the sport knows, crew chief is a decent gig too.  With Chad being a driver I think he will make a good crew chief for Brett.  I think the two can speak the lingo and know what to do when the car needs changes.

Morris Van Vleet will be our car chief this year.  He has spent the past two weeks solid here at the shops in West Virginia getting the Daytona car ready to go.  He has gone over everything and that's what I like about him.  When the car goes to the track I will feel like it is ready to go which is how an owner should feel.  I know Morris cares about the car and the product he takes to the track and that is one of his many strengths.  I think he will be a perfect fit in the car chief position.

Today it is about 18 degrees and four inches of snow fell this morning.  We are behind, as I am sure every NASCAR team is, but we have another week and we will use our time wisely.  The car is almost done.  Just the final setup, a little body touchup to get the templates fitting just right and a few touches and it should be ready to go.  I expect it to be ready for vinyl by Friday and we will spend the weekend getting it lettered up, waxed, final checked and loaded on the hauler.  I talked to Brett this morning.  He and Morris are in the shop today.  They had the car running last night and said all is coming along as planned.

Believe it or not, next Monday is pull out day.  Dave Thomas, our hauler man, will drive up from his Nashville home on Monday morning and we will be pulling out for Daytona by late afternoon.  Need to be at the track by 3 p.m. on Tuesday so we plan to split the 800 or so miles over two days.

A lot remains to be done between now and then, but I feel like we are well on our way.  A full day in the hauler getting the uniforms loaded, pit crew stuff situated, radios charged and checked and things like that and we will be ready.  Our rear tire carrier, Greg Smith, is planning a few days in the shop toward late week this coming week and the guys at ECO-FIRST, Sterling Ayers and Millard Ryder, are putting new batteries on the semi and doing some touchup work on the trailer this week to make sure it is ready for the trip.

We have big dreams for Daytona.  I hear there may be 55-60 cars entered in the Nationwide Series, but you never know for sure until you see the entry list.  Regardless, we feel like we have prepared the best we can and we'll see how we stack up against the nation's best in just over a week.  Talk to you again soon.

Dana Tomes