Pilot's Log

I bought more Race Day packs today and it closed up much of my collection's gaps. At least the ones in the "old" set, anyway. The "new" set packs are cheaper and two of the drivers I still want are commons so I'm pretty much assured that I'll get them eventually if I keep buying packs. I'm already hitting the Law of Diminishing Returns, tho'; three of the eight cards I got today were duplicates, so if the averages keep going as seen, I'll have a load of them if I buy too many packs.

I don't so much want to complete the set as to have the overwhelming majority of the available drivers, but with a minimum of duplicates.

Meanwhile, I have to buy new ink for my printer as we need to have a lot of documents copied and run off in the near future. My unit takes two different sizes of ink cartridges (black and tri-color each), and while our favorite office supply store markets their own cartridges that are cheaper than the original manufacturers', they don't have the larger black one in their stocks. But they might have two-for-one packs of the smaller black ones.

The art of this bargain is to decide which combination of cartridges is more economic for our uses. Which means I won't just have to bring product numbers and a coupon...I'll need my calculator.

--And possibly random shopping.

I found a tourist trap shop that has an abundant supply of now-passe NASCAR Race Day packs. Race Day is a game that Wizkids put out in 2005~'06 with stock car models printed onto plastic card pieces that the user assembles. The track is a poster-sized sheet of paper that is also included in the game pack. (Suddenly I want to call it "NASCARcheezi".) I got five packs, opened them, and got a little educated on the game itself and the topic of "rarity" as it applies to such things.

There are three levels of rarity at play here: COMMON, UNCOMMON and RARE. Every pack in my sample had an Uncommon, and since there are twelve Uncommons in the set if the selection premise holds, then there is a 1 in 12 chance of getting any specific Uncommon in any pack. The remaining pieces in my sample were split between Commons and Rares 3 to 2, so if that held, then logically the likelihood of getting a specific Rare is 40% less than that of getting a specific Uncommon, since there are an equal number of Uncommons and Rares in the total series set.

Again presuming my selection premise is true, there is a 60% chance of getting a Common in any pack, and so because there are only 4 Commons in the set, a 15% chance of getting a specific Common. And a mathematic certainty of getting a specific Common from buying only seven packs at a random.

I'm glad that I didn't have a fandom reason to get into this earlier, but at the same time, I wish I could have done a better job learning probability math in college.

Over the weekend was the drawing for a sweepstakes I had entered online (and of course, did not win)...it was from Ford Racing and the prize was a 7-liter V8 race car engine of the latest version.

I had no ready use for such a thing, but it was fun to brainstorm possibilities. What WOULD I do with such an engine? Did I have a tasty recipie for the Secret Ingredient?

Upgrading an existing vehicle is the most basic idea, of course. Mustang, T-Bird, Taurus, Crown Vic, Pickup, Lincoln Mark #, Cougar, whatevs. Sure. Plenty of project cars to be had. Heck, that Mach 1 across the street is still theoretically available.

Early Thirties "rat rod"? I know a local shop that can build one in their sleep.

Replica Cobra roadster or Shelby Mustang? That's practically a cliché for current kit cars. Repro bodies-in-white for Sixties Mustangs are almost a phone call away.

Spec racer? Late model? Road-legal NASCAR stocker? I know where to look for those too.

So where did I wind up going on my train of thought? GTs. Ford had two from my lifetime that I was interested in: the GT70 and the Mustang GTP. The former was a possible follow-on to the GT40 that Ford developed at the end of the Sixties but never put on the track. The latter was run in IMSA in the early 1980s...but never built with a V8 engine, although Roush Racing wanted to build such a machine. A replica of something that never was? A rewrite of motorsports history? Could I have gotten away with it?

( Some Race Car Footage From ALMS Long Beach ) so I don't have to make a blog post in case mere crummy turns to bad, if not worse.

Action shots from the St. Petersburg Grand Prix over the weekend:


Sebastien Bourdais


Katherine Legge


Oriol Servia


Simona DeSilvestro


Alex Tagliani

I'm going heavily into Lotus this year.

I'm not done, probably, but I feel close enough to that point.

A NASCAR Dodge Charger for 2012, altered to the shade of orange used for the General Lee Charger in THE DUKES OF HAZZARD. I did this because of the Bubba Watson/General Lee/Phoenix racetrack story in the news.