Those pesky three “R’s” that our grammar school grannies, (Hey, they were in fact old and were very Victorian and scary in appearance when I was class clowning my way through grammar school so no disparages intended), were trying to teach us back in the olden days take on a new and more palatable meaning for me.   I call them, Reading, Writing and Racing! That’s what I want to do with the rest of my life. You see I love to read a good story and I wish to get good enough at writing to write a great one and I am definitely in love with Racing! I just want to keep tying them together. My imagination runs in Technicolor and I can live right inside, up close and personal with the characters. Heck, I’ve got most of what I need right now but it’s just not continuous enough to string together. There are just too many distractions and gaps in managing a career, a family and trying to follow your dreams.   Because of a little bit of a lull in the action while we are waiting to get on the salt, I have been re-reading one of my favorite inspirational books of all time. Its Andy Granatelli’s book “They call me Mr. 500” published just shortly after the 1969 Indy 500 in which they won the race with Mario Andretti driving. This book just seems to draw me in and I can live the story moment by moment and identify with those guys. It’s basically a “rags to riches” story and it revolves around Andy and his brothers exploits in motor-racing.   I’ve had the unique privilege in actually meeting some of the key figures in the book who became famous right along with the Granatelli’s at the speedway. They all tell the same stories that are in the book and back up what really happened and that has a great deal of influence on me when I read it. Some of what they have gone through to have been so successful for 35 plus years in racing just can’t be made up! I won’t re-hash the whole story here but I do recommend reading it because it is just plain THAT GOOD of a story. When I helped run Don Lyons' 1964 Kuzma Indy Roadster (Mario Andretti's first indy car) for the making of the IMAX movie "Superspeedway" I would try to encourage the cast and crew to recount some of their favorite stories during the frequent "lulls" in the action (imagine 30 to 40 minutes to load the IMAX film camera and only three minutes to shoot it. We had a lot of free time...). I was angling for Mario Andretti (star of the movie) to chime in with some great stories of his own when a spectator walked up and asked Mario how fast he had been going in the roadster? He opened up the most wry smile and said, "oh about three or four hundred" (you gotta use an Italian accent to make it sound really right). Everyone chuckled and he then went on to tell a story right out of the Granatelli book! My point here is that a really great story can outlive us many times over and never loose it's luster. It's just Magic!  I can feel it in my bones that there is a great story that can come out of chasing after some world land speed records and I also feel that it has yet to be done even though there is a great deal of docu-drama type tomes available but they just don’t have that “spark” that makes all the difference to the reader. You dig what I’m saying? Yes I have seen the “Worlds Fastest Indian” and yes it is a very well done movie but it has just soaked up too much “Hollywood” to suit me. I know that I am not alone in this opinion. The adventure is undeniable and the drama is as thick as you need it to be because it is an incredibly difficult goal to go after. The tension of the driver and crew just grows and grows and life is intensely magnified in the moment! When people are faced with these massive challenges, they rise to the occasion and great things happen... To me this is the coolest part…It is still waiting to be written! For me it would mean that life has come full circle and my dreams have come true!   Wow! We could have some real live FUN in putting it all together! Yeah we live by our dreams…God has made it so.   Always Racing, Phil