How are things going?

Dear friends and family,

Just wanted to make a quick update to say hello and let everyone know what I have been up to. While I have been away from England I feel like a few of the projects I have been working on - with teams and sponsors have been unattended a bit. However since I left England I have remained fully emersed in motorsport, on account of Al Mitchell, the manager of MSR Houston (www.msrhouston.com) who was kind enough to extend an invitation to me to help out around his circuit while I was in the states.

Since I have been down here I have been helping them get their karting operation up and running. They recently built an incredible eight-tenths of a mile kart circuit and they are looking forward to getting a full rental and competition race program up and running. I have been helping get those things up and running and in the process have gotten to do a bit of driving myself!

MSR Houston is absolutely fantastic and a blast to be around. I can only begin to tell you about the facilities they have set up for the members of the track. My favorite thing on site, which I have not done yet, but agree fully to in principle and plan to try out soon is a shotgun shooting range. My friends in England will not believe it, since guns are prohibited (without a special license). However here in Texas we have lots of guns and naturally a clay targets range at the racing track is a fundamental piece of the puzzle. There is also a work out facility which I have been spending some time in while I haven't been working.

Additionally there is a lake on site for fishing. I must say, I don't think having a lake is that special, because PalmerSport has a lake as well. As you might remember PalmerSport has a special tradition of throwing lucky birthday people into the lake. In the lake they have here in Houston there is a real, live, honest-to-god Aligator. I was able to take a few pictures of it and I will have to upload them to prove it to all of you soon. I thing getting a birthday treat of being thrown in the pond would be less than optimal.

As many of you might have heard the weather is getting a bit dodgy around here. The last I heard there was a level 3, (read: 120 mile per hour wind) hurricane called Ike bearing down on my present local. I haven't ever been in a hurricane before and in fact never in any major disaster for that matter. A lot of people around the coast of Houston have evacuated along with many others throughout the city. Since we are not in an evacuation area we are going to hold up as the hurricane passes. I'm not sure if I will get a chance, but I will try to take a picture to show you what it looks like. We were considering opening up some of the garages (two doors at booth end of building) putting a race car on scales and doing some aerodynamic wind tunnel testing. Sounds a whole heck of a lot cheaper than buying our own wind tunnel!

Hope all of you are doing well. I am enjoying things down here (bar hurricane) and am looking to getting back to Europe soon!

Warmest regards

Michael