NASCAR Day

It's Spring Break this week.  Since we haven't been to Charlotte to visit race shops recently enough for Jeremiah to remember, we headed up there Monday.  He's become a big racecar fan in the last year, so he was excited to see all there was to see.

We had never been to Stewart-Haas Racing before.  They had really good viewing windows into their shop, and several cars in the lobby:

Our next stop (after a closed Earnhardt-Ganassi disappointment) was Roush Fenway.  Jeremiah was very excited to see the Aflac car, but there aren't any good pictures of that.

(The customary "proof I was there.")

Also, we saw Trevor Bayne (Daytona 500 winner) coming out of the Roush shop as we were showing up.

Next was Hendrick, where Jeremiah insisted on taking his Jeff Gordon toy car inside to show "the real Jeff Gordon."  He doesn't quite get that Jeff Gordon is actually the driver of the car, and not the car itself.

Joseph with his favorite:

Perhaps the coolest part of the day came as we were leaving Hendrick.  An employee on a golf cart pulled up behind us as we were getting into the van and asked if we wanted a number.  He then gave us the 8 that they had just pulled off Jimmie's car's driver's side.  We didn't think to confirm whether it had come off the car he had won Talladega with the previous day.  I'm saying it was.  Very cool.

Our next stop was another first for us--the NASCAR Hall of Fame:

There were lots of cool things to see and do at the Hall.  Probably the best display was a bunch of cars from different eras lined up along a track that was progressively more steeply banked as it went.  At the end it was 33 degrees of banking, and there was a place you could walk up on it to see how steep that really is.

There were some simple simulators, as well as some inside real cars (not pictured).

There were also pit crew challenges.  Jeremiah enjoyed changing the tires:

He and Joshua pretended to call a race on the radio.  Actually, they paid no attention to the race on the screen.  They just enjoyed having microphones and headsets and talking to each other:

By the end of the day, Jeremiah was completely overstimulated, and also, DONE.  He and I went back downstairs and hung out while Tony and the big boys drove the simulators (1st place for both) one more time.  He was quite content to sit here between his two favorite cars for at least 20 minutes.  He liked the blue one because it was painted like Mr.King from the Cars movie, and the red one because it was shaped like Mr. King.