The Walk of Shame

By: Dennis Terry

For college Co-eds the "walk of shame" is both a sense of accomplishment as well as an embarrassing parade in front of your student body classmates.  A good friend of mine, from Lenoir, North Carolina, introduced me to the idiom at 7:45 one Friday morning while we were heading to an 8:00 Linear Algebra exam at NC State.

We passed one of our female classmates scurrying from the athletic dorms back to her dorm and hoping to get a shower, get dressed and make it her final exam in time.  She was still dressed (somewhat) in her best Thursday night bar attire and she was quite flustered and visibly embarrassed as she passed everyone else heading in the opposite direction to their classes.

"There's XOXOXOX making the walk of shame", he proclaimed as everyone took notice and she tried to look nonchalant.

Mike's comment was all I could think about as our pit crew made its way back to garage during Sunday's Pocono race.  As if crashing our car twice in as many races wasn't bad enough, we had to make our way from pit stall 43 all the way down pit road and back to the garage. 

We tried to walk unnoticed as all of our competitors sat on pit wall waiting out another Pocono rain delay and giving us their best looks of, "better luck next week guys".

The Indianapolis Goodyear debacle actually helped 500 miles at Pocono seem more like a quick and exciting race, but packing up and leaving before the checkered flag never gets any less disappointing to me. 

When racing is your passion there is nothing worse than watching the end of the race at an airport.

We expect to have a very good race at Watkins Glen next week where our team has always raced well.  With the Watkins Glen backwards pit stops, we will all have a different look on pit road.  Hopefully, we won’t have to look at any rain tires nor will our competitors have to look at us packing up early and taking another walk of shame.

DT