Even professional race car drivers lose their car keys
By Nick Bromberg
From the Marbles Thu Apr 22, 2010 3:18 pm EDT
If you follow Team Penske IRL driver Ryan Briscoe or his wife, ESPN
NASCAR Now host Nicole Briscoe on Twitter, you may be familiar with
Ryan losing the keys to his brand new smart car.
As the rain washed out testing at Kansas Speedway today, I had the
chance to ask Ryan if he ever found the key. (Spoiler Alert: no, he
never did)
"On the way back (from the St. Petersburg race) I'm looking in my
backpack and looking for the key and I have no idea. So I told one
of my buddies from the team that 'Hey, hang around because I might
need a lift home.' I got my suitcase out, looked through the whole
suitcase. Checked the airport, the hotel, Avis, it never showed
up," Briscoe said.
"I don't know, I must have dropped it somewhere. And then what
happened--it was a disaster--I drove to the dealership because they
told me that they had a spare key for me. So the dealership's like
an hour from my house and I say 'Hey I'm here to pick up the spare
key' and they say 'did you bring the smart car with you?' And I'm
like 'No, because I lost the other key at the airport...'"
The car had to be hardwired at the dealership for the key to be
synced with the car.
"So we had to get the car towed to the dealership and then they get
it down there and then they say the couldn't sync the new key to it
without the primary key. So then they had to have, from Smart USA,
a mother key or some computer module sent to the dealership to sync
a brand new key to it," Briscoe said.
"It took two weeks but now I'm good."
"For when the One Great Scorer comes
To write against your name,
He marks-not that you won or lost-
But how you played the game."
-Grantland Rice