Media Tour Stop No. 11: Breakfast In A Furniture Store

It was an early start to Day 3 of the Media Tour, with reporters still rubbing the sleep from their eyes and many likely wondering if they were still dreaming.

After all, the first stop of the morning seemed somewhat surreal: Breakfast in a furniture store.

Since Furniture Row Racing’s race shop is in Colorado, a field trip halfway across the country was clearly out of the question. So the team had a local Furniture Row store open its doors early and served up a big breakfast spread.

Media members ate in the dining section of the store – on the actual tables for sale, sitting on chairs with sale tags attached.

My seat said it was $75, which I didn’t intend to purchase but feared a “You Stain It, You Buy It” policy with the salsa from my breakfast burrito.

Anyway, though former Dale Earnhardt Jr. crew chief Pete Rondeau calls the shots atop the pit box at Furniture Row, the real star of the show was Regan Smith.

And Mr. Smith, it seems, is quite confident about his chances this year. He predicted Furniture Row would be running “consistent top-10s” by the end of the season.

“At the end of the year, I felt like I was finally understanding a little bit about the Cup racing and what’s going on,” Smith said. ”... It’s like, ‘OK, we’re going to go out and make the most of what we’ve got this year – and we’re going to make a lot of out of it.’

“So for me personally, my confidence is as high as it’s ever been, hands down.”

I left the Furniture Row store wondering if the customers who planned to shop there later would detect the smell of bacon and grease, and whether that would make them more or less likely to buy a kitchen table.

The day is just getting started. There are five more stops today: Richard Petty Motorsports, a Ford Racing lunch, Hendrick Motorsports, the big NASCAR points announcement and Sprint’s unveiling of the new Miss Sprint Cups.