This entry, the second in a series, was submitted by AAA’s Christie Hyde who accompanied the winners on their job-shadowing trip. Read all posts here.

Tuesday was the first official day of 2009 Ford/AAA Student Auto Skills national champs’ job shadowing with Roush Fenway Racing’s DeWALT Racing team. But our morning didn’t start over at team’s headquarters in Concord. Instead, we loaded into our Hertz rental SUV for a daytrip with the team to Rockingham Speedway.

Our drive to ‘The Rock’ took about two hours from Concord, N.C.—most of which was through North Carolina backcountry and several small towns.  We made our way down U.S. 1 passing lots of family farms and then the tremendous speedway seemed to appear out of nowhere.

The Rock, formerly known as North Carolina Speedway, is a one-mile, D-shaped oval surrounded by grandstands that hold approximately 60,000. For nearly 40 years it was a fixture on the NASCAR circuit, but it hosted its final race in February 2004.

And now, we returned to the track with last NASCAR driver to stand in its Victory Lane — Matt Kenseth. Back in 2004, Kenseth held off then rookie Kasey Kahne on the last lap to win by only 0.010 seconds. Today, he comes to the track to test his No. 17 DeWALT Ford Fusion to better prepare him and his team for the final races in NASCAR’s ‘Race to the Chase.’

The Rock has become a very popular place for many NASCAR teams to test due to the series’ new rule in 2009 banning any testing at a track that hosts a NASCAR-sanctioned event. With most tracks hosting some form of NASCAR racing during the year, The Rock is one of the few the teams can rent for private testing like we are attending. And we weren’t with the only team taking advantage of The Rock for testing. NASCAR driver Marcos Ambrose and his team were just outside the Speedway testing on a newly built half-mile track remarkable similar to Martinsville Speedway.  One thing immediately noticed by Auto Skills winners—Justin Dwyer, Matt Ludwig and instructor Mark Lessman— is that more time is spent in the garage than on the track during testing. In fact, Kenseth rarely ran the No. 17 DeWALT car more than three or four laps before bringing it back into the garage for the engineer to download data from the car and the crew to make more tweets to the set-up. Different combinations of tire pressure, springs, sway bars adjustments and more were tried throughout the day as the team tried to gather some hints of what might make them quicker on race day. As the day drew to a close, Justin and Matt helped the team load all their equipment and race car back into the DeWALT hauler, and we began our trek back west to Concord. For most of the drive back to hotel, we followed behind Matt Kenseth and one of the DeWALT team members who had ridden their Harleys up to track for the day. After a day at the track in 95-degree heat, we were all ready for a cold shower upon returning to Springhill Suites. After freshening up, we ventured out to find something for dinner. With a huge storm on the verge of hitting us, we decided to go to one of the first places we came across so we could take shelter before it hit, and ended up at Max & Erma’s Restaurant.  Known for their gourmet burgers, that’s what all of us ended up getting. And Matt and Justin were brave enough to take on their garbage burger that was covered in bacon, four types of cheese, grilled onions, sautéed mushrooms, guacamole and marinara. With our stomachs complete stuffed, we headed back to the hotel for a good night’s rest. More updates on twitter.com/AAAauto and Facebook.com/autoskills