Not sure how I ended up here!!

Dear Friends,

The past few weeks at the Houston MSR have been a bit of a blur. To be honest it has been fantastic, lots of driving (in karts) and the chance to create a racing program to my hearts desire. I have been entrusted with the strategic planning on the MSR Houston karting program for 2009 and beyond. It is a brand new kart circuit so there are not a lot of people set in their ways which gives me a good freedom to change things for the better of racing.

While I have been busy working on the karting project, there have been a lot of cool things happening around me. Last week I traveled to Texas World Speedway which is located in College Station, Texas (for you Brit's reading this, College Station is about as Texas as you can get). I had the change to meet an interesting gentleman who is the global director of a firm which is involved in international business. He also drives a fantastic Porsche GT3 RS which he took me for a tour of the TWS circuit before it promptly broke on the second lap... Only a $1,500 dollar pressure plate in the clutch. The fourth one he's done in the past year!

This week MSR Houston has been hoping. On Wednesday AJ Foyt's Indy car racing team arrived on the scene for a sponsor appreciate day and a test with their new driver, Vietor Miera. There were rumors Vietor might be going to Penske, but as it turns out Foyt was able to grab him. It was great fun to watch the VP's from their sponsor company ABC Supply company (a home building supply firm) having a go in a 700 horse power indy car. I am pretty sure none of them got out of first gear!

On Thursday and Friday the course stayed hot with the arrival of Chip Ganassi's team. After the recent sacking of Dan Wheldon the team is doing some testing with their new driver Dario Franchetti a refuge from the Andretti Green racing team and failed (I suppose) convert to NASCAR world. Franchetti did probably 150 miles over the two days in the car doing short 3-5 lap test intervals.

This evening (Saturday) was absolutely wild!! One of the members of the kart track decided it would be well cool to set up a booth at the local fair. I haven't been to a local fair before, and quite frankly I haven't been to anything like it before! There was the widest assortment of people I have ever seen at one place at one time, however the majority of them leaned towards the cowboy side of things. During the fair they had a concert (country music) and there was a no B.S. rodeo taking place where I got to see a few riders go the whole 8 seconds and one unlucky chap who shunted with the ground after being pitched off his bull. Doesn't look like a good result as I saw a helicopter leaving the premesis.

I hope this message finds you doing very well. The slow trickle of news has been on account of staying so busy on this karting project! It might not be necessarily getting me any closer to Formula 1, but I feel like it is really going to help the program out at MSR and I hope to see it doing a lot of good for them in the future.

Wishing you the best

Michael