Now that Mark has had corrective
back surgery, he is working on protecting his ears. Mark instructed
his team to work over the winter on reducing the amount of
noise that gets into his race car, which he believes is
threatening his ability to hear.
"Just as I don't care to be a crippled old man. I don't care to be deaf
either," Mark said Jan 15th. "These cars are ridiculously loud
and we don't seem to be able to get any muffler mandated for 'em, so
one of the projects over the winter was to see if we can cut
down some on the noise that was getting to my ears so that I don't
have to turn the radio up so loud and have a migraine headache
when the race is over. I can't hear what they are saying on the radio,
so I turn the radio up so loud that it tickles the inside
of my ears and I don't think that's healthy. The noise reduction
project was one of three things Mark said he asked his team
to work on to make him more comfortable in his car and at the
race track. "I come up here with three things for my race team to do
over the winter and none of them had to do with performance, " he said.
"One of them was to make sure the remote control in the transporter
works for the TV. Another was to get this noise situation cut
down, which we can, it's just that nobody is looking into
that. That's just one area that is totally overlooked that
should be done. I can't even remember what the other thing was,
but it was also a creature comfort kind of thing. What that tells
me is that I have a great race team that already has the
performance end of things covered."
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