Couch Surfing

I'm officially part of the Charlotte racing community couch surfing club

Is Ron Hornaday’s couch still available? That’s where all the greats started when they found themselves homeless in Charlotte trying to make it in racing, right?

So, I closed on the sale of my house this week (finally) and am temporarily homeless with whatever I didn’t sell, trash or give away stuffed into a 10x25 storage unit. My entire life is in a storage unit, which is kind of weird when you stand there looking at it.

(Syd Fryer in the empty house in the village we just moved out of )

My apologies on not posting in a bit and not being more active. It’s been super hectic for me with the sale of the house, the fall off the swivel stool, the broken elbow, the moldy closet, broken chimney, rotted floor board under the free plant and all the stupidness thrown my way the last six to eight weeks.

Additionally, if you are a paying subscriber for my motorsports coverage, I encourage you to cancel your subscription. I am not going to be covering motorsports the way I did for AP anymore, with more news on this coming soon.

I was walking through the Daytona paddock during Rolex 24 week (maybe I’ve told you all this part before) when I received an email congratulating me on 30 years with AP. When I read it, I did not feel excited or accomplished or as I had achieved some sort of milestone.

I felt …. sad. In that moment passing the Action Express trucks I was like “Holy shit, I’ve got a decision to make. I’m either going to be an AP lifer or I’ve got to go find something new to do pretty soon.”

I confided in maybe a dozen or so people from that time in early January into March that I was gently looking around for something else. Like many others invested in the NASCAR antitrust trial, I felt this tremendous letdown and emptiness when it ended. It had been something so fresh and different and new and really invigorated me, and it was a hard transition to just go back to a media center and another race track and start doing the same routine I’d been doing for so many years.

Here’s the thing about being a beat writer, especially in motorsports: It. Is. A. Grind. Bob Pockrass works his ass off. Marshall Pruett works his ass off. Jeff Gluck and Jordan Bianchi and Matt Weaver and Kelly Crandall and Holly Cain and Lee and Reid Spencer and Bruce Martin all work their asses off. Anyone who does this full-time works really, really hard 24/7 and 365 days a year. It is the job of a beat reporter to know anything and everything and to find out things before others and it is relentless.

When I did it for AP, I had to do it for NASCAR, IndyCar, IMSA and F1. It’s a lot to chase, it isn’t fun confronting people about bad or unpleasant news, it sucks when the public thinks you are an asshole for a question you asked. There are great, fulfilling parts of the job, but there’s also a lot of sucky parts and long rain delays in windowless media centers and a brutal schedule and bad food and crummy hotels and living out of a suitcase that is never fully unpacked (I am currently living out of two suitcases, a laundry bag, three tote bags and a 3X3 Rubbermaid as I transition into what I will be doing next).

I was at the AC/DC concert earlier this month (no questioning of my life choices, please) and one of the people I was with had the O’Reilly race from Atlanta up on the phone during the concert. In that moment I got to thinking about how you never really can turn it off or tune it out, that much of our daily existence is based around schedules set by sanctioning bodies.

I started to remember how Valentine’s Day and President’s Day and Fourth of July always meant Daytona, how Memorial Day always meant Indy or Charlotte, how for years the week before Thanksgiving was Homestead and the week after Thanksgiving was the banquet. I missed a high school reunion in 2001 because it was scheduled the same weekend NASCAR raced rescheduled New Hampshire following the 9/11 attacks. I missed funerals and weddings and lots of life events because I was always committed to being at a race track, and here at AC/DC as 71-year-old Angus Young performed a frenetic prolonged guitar solo, at the same time the NASCAR race went into its 37th red flag, it kind of made me sad how much of MY life was spent documenting the racing lives of everyone else.

I want a break from that. I want a break from being JFF. I want a break from social media attacks. I want a break from the grind and a break from spending all my time chasing the news and gossip and transactions of four different paddocks. Some people know this, but I hate writing obit prep, and it’s a requirement of the job. For over two years AP was seriously pressuring me to get the prep done on one specific person. I had a writing block when it came to this person and I never could sit myself down and do the prep on this person. For me, because of the pace of the AP workflow, I can quickly write an obit in real time and for this specific person, I was mentally and emotionally frozen from doing any prep at all. When I left AP in May, I still had not done that obit. I want a break from writing obits.

Will I ever go back to being a beat reporter? Who knows. Right now I am going to do something totally different and I am going to step back from trying to be the first person to learn who will drive the 48 in 2028 or who will drive the 9 next year in IndyCar or if Max Verstappen is leaving Red Bull or if RFK will have three charters. On and on and on and on.

So I will share more about what I am going to do next very soon, after I check on my couch status, of course. I thank all of you who followed me here and I do plan to stay here, but this is going to transition more into chronicles of my midlife crisis Larry David kinda life and my adaption into a brand new life of very fresh changes. I don’t think many of you want to read my online diary because I’m probably not as funny as I think I am, so I thank you all for the support as I navigated the last three months. You should 100 percent (take that AP stylebook) cancel your subscription or unsubscribe if you are here for the news and the analysis of all things motorsports.

You should also unsubscribe if you have zero interest in my follies. I like it here at substack because it is so much kinder than X. It feels like a safe space, and with that I believe I can come here and be more open about me. I don’t know how Jeff Gluck shares so much of his personality on some of the other platforms and opens himself to a crowd that can be very, very nasty. The last two weeks were very hard on two women I respect — Danielle Trotta and Nancy Armour — and I watched it play out. As much as I do support both of their rights to have opinions, I didn’t dare post something about either or their respective topics. Why would I want to be thrown into that for sharing my own opinion?

I am not going to miss that.

So, more from me later, if you are still interested enough to stick around.

-30-

Oh, completely unrelated, I have a friend going through it right now and not having the best day and also is a grown adult who doesn’t know how to use the post office. So I did a video tutorial of using the post office to help understand the process of using the mail. Anyway, said friend only cheered up when we got around to discussing how great the two guys who work at the post office and make our days every time we are in there selling items from the thrift store. I did a video tutorial of using the kiosk to avoid the line and the friend said “but then I wouldn’t get to talk to the guy at the counter.” And I said “Shannon?”

-30- — again

(We planted this tree like 20 years ago and used it for first and last day of school every year)