“Righto gang, this one may have to be a bit shorter. It’s the start of Day 5 (before qualifying) and I haven’t been able to find a PowerPoint adaptor as of yet anywhere here in the states, so no laptop charge for me and I’m now having to type this out on my phone!

“Yesterday was the first official practice and first time out with some of the fast guys.

“The on track didn’t start until 5:30pm. So it was quite a late start. We had to pick up a part for Dad’s car while over here to save the postage hassles, so we went towards Austin to go and get that sorted.

“On the way there and back, we could not find a good place to eat whatsoever. It was either fast food or closed. We got to 11 o’clock and ended up just going to wherever Google maps would take us.

“It was hard having two hungry blokes with me in the car. Especially since the boys’ coffee got screwed up at Starbucks. Now there could be two reasons for this.

1. The barista may not have liked Australians
2. Cam may have tried to give the girl his phone number!

“We were ordering our coffees and in Cam’s defence, a lot of places here take down your numbers to text you when your orders ready. Well, Cam was half out of it midway through ordering and the girl behind the counter asks him “what size would you like?” Then Cam just starts rattling off his phone number. The girl was completely confused and I probably looked the same way until he realised and just said ‘large’ as if nothing happened. It gave her a good laugh so I guess that’s a good deed done for the day!

“We headed to the track and went through the TA pits. We’re pitted all the way on the other side of the paddock so we’re a long way away from them all. But damn, the setups over here are so much bigger than Australia it’s crazy. The trucks fold out into tents for the cars and teams to be based in, so it’s basically just a self oiled machine and they can setup anywhere there’s a flat piece of ground! The tech inspection over here is huge as well, you wouldn’t be getting away with anything here!

“The on track stuff was pretty vanilla. Nothing too exciting to report on. I was fighting the car a bit and trying to improve on my driving for these cars. I was comfortably in the top 10 which I was quite happy with, although take it with a grain of salt as my transponder wasn’t working so that’s in no way shape or form official.

“I’m running out of time to do this, Cam’s coffee story managed to take up a fair bit of time!

“But a big thank you to everyone for all of the support. It’s been a cool trip so far. Let’s see how today goes. One more practice and a qualifying to come!