This is a great tire. Some guys were throwing out some great shots (in testing) when the weather was cool, but I knew that when it came to race day and it got a little warm out in the middle of the day, it would be a challenge, and that's what we worked on in testing.

We've done all that we can think, as far as testing in a one-G environment and simulating the effects of our (shuttle) maneuvers on the mast. But there is that element of risk that there may be something we didn't get, that we don't quite understand.

The weather report last night said that the snow was going to be south of us.

My father, who has become too deaf to listen to reason, bores us with news of the weather. We have lost the sense of seasons; our climate has been degenerating since the first nuclear explosion in Nevada a generation ago. He remembers that radioactive clouds traveled from Nevada to upstate New York and that all the exposed negatives in the Kodak laboratories in Rochester were damaged. He says he saw a news item about it in an early edition of a Montreal paper, but that in the later editions it had been left out. Did we read it then? Do we think about it now?

We've had it for a few months. We're testing it to see the effectiveness.

Some companies have terminated drug testing.