TORONTO-It's all over the news. There's another "Winter Storm Warning" plastered on every television here, a little red ribbon of inconvenience running its way along the bottom of everybody's spanking new widescreen TV (everybody but me, being firmly in the 4:3 until my kids are old enough not to dirty the screen with their little fingers). ;-)

Yep, another pile of snow is on the way, which makes picking up our new donor car (which is in Geneva, N.Y., a convenient four hours from Toronto drive-away, in normal conditions) an unlikely prospect. We actually had good, solid, logical plans to get our new car today. But, like so many things, we were let down by something beyond our control. In this case, our landlord hadn't plowed the parking lot properly, which left our collection of trailers (we have three) snowbound in amongst the five-foot high banks. I'm sure the guy plowing the snow had some system he was working to, but it was lost on us as we tried to extricate at least one of our trailers early this morning.

By the time we did, today's window of opportunity had closed (we needed to be at the border on the return trip home by 3 p.m. to file the importation paperwork, which meant we had to leave by 9 a.m.), and with this big storm coming it means we'll have to wait until Thursday.

What's the rush? Heck, the Grand-Am KONI Challenge race at Lime Rock Park is still two-and-a-half months away! True, but if you're building a new car (which we are), you're going to need to do some testing. Which means we need to be ready by early April. Which leaves us, oh, about a month!

Which isn't really that much time when you're taking a car, which was quite clearly ready to find itself doing the school run day in and day out in upstate New York, but is now going to be stripped of its interior, fitted with a roll cage, and will be turned into what we hope will be the best example of Street Stock racing anywhere.

And we've got yet another big dump of the white stuff coming! On one hand, as an avid snowboarder, I love it. More powder! Whoopee! And yet, like many of us on the eastern seaboard, after three months of solid weekends at the hill, I've had enough. From the team perspective, we've got to get that new car here as soon as we can. But we don't want to be travelling through unnecessarily treacherous conditions just to gain a day. And yet, we do. Because the competition in Grand-Am's KONI Challenge is simply that close. That fierce. In other words, every day, every moment, is precious.
By this time next week, I hope we'll have stripped our new car and it'll be well on its way to a new cage and a bunch of go-faster bits. Weather permitting, of course.

Labels: gablog