Hello everyone,

I wanted to take a moment to introduce myself. My name is Dan Fastuca. Like many of you, I am a Corvette fanatic. You may have seen some of my Corvettes in the July 2009 issue of VETTE magazine, where I appeared with my long-time friend and racing legend Dick Guldstrand.

I have spent my life as a guitar player, playing professionally for many big-name artists.

I was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My family’s business manufactures weapon systems for the U.S. military. Over the years it has received many acknowledgments from the Department of Defense and even the President of the United States, who personally presented the American flag to my brother. Unfortunately my family lost that brother to cancer.

I have many friends currently active in our military who I believe are heroes by default. This, and the fact that I have traveled the world (because of my guitar playing), has brought me to the conclusion that we live in the greatest country on the planet.

I am a friend of Corvette Racing’s Pratt and Miller team and was asked by the American Le Mans Series to perform the National Anthem at this past weekend’s Mid-Ohio ALMS race. What an honor it was to perform for everyone at the venue wearing Ron Fellows driving suit!

The event also offered me the opportunity to auction off a personal guitar autographed by me for a local cancer institute and come to the help of Ohioans in need.

Unfortunately, I have learned that a person working for Mid Ohio took offense to my appearance and my rendition of our National Anthem.

The producer of the pre-race show asked me to fill over four minutes of time instead of the prearranged anthem (about 2 minutes long). As I walked on to perform, the producer held up "time-remaining" cards in front of me to indicate exactly how much time was needed to fill. This said, I just riffed around a bit on the guitar, shut it down for a second (to indicate that this would be the beginning of the National Anthem), and then began playing the anthem itself. By reading a different forum just last night, it became clear that people thought that the entire 4-5 minutes was my rendition of the National Anthem. The venue’s PA was also distorting and cutting in and out. I figured that as it was already doing so during the spoken interviews with people, people would figure out that the poor sound was the PA, not my rig. Unfortunately, some did not. The real shame is I only participated in this to make people happy. I apologize that some did not enjoy my being there, but keep in mind that the person working at the track was yelling, ‘Unplug him. We did not sign on for this. This is not our image!’ This was all before I played.” During the performance, the PA was cutting out due to a microphone setup which I advised was incorrect.

One thing I have learned over the years is that you can’t please everyone all of the time. I am sure that my appearance and guitar-playing style is not for everyone. To my knowledge, there are still people who are offended by Jimi Hendrix’s rendition of the National Anthem, as well. Therefore, I do not have a problem with anyone who may not have liked my performance.

Now this person has chosen to post an alert on the Mid Ohio web site, accusing me of being unpatriotic and apologizing to race fans for my performance. I have played the National Anthem publicly at many different types of events all over the world, including Corvette races, and never had a complaint.

To anyone who may not have enjoyed my performance, I say from the bottom of my heart, I offer my apology if you had the impression that I am anything but patriotic.

To the many, many people from the crowd, Corvette Racing, and other race teams who stopped me to tell me they thought my playing of the National Anthem at Mid-Ohio was “a great job” and “very cool,” I am very thankful for your comments and that you would take the time out of your lives to let me know that you enjoyed my performance.

I think the most flattering compliment I received was from a couple that stopped me to say, “We saw Jimi Hendrix perform his version of the National Anthem at Woodstock and we said we would never see anything that cool again, but today we did. Great job!”

I just wanted the opportunity to fill everyone in. The people who know me personally know that disrespectful, is the last thing I am. Thanks so much to the alms for all your support.


Dan Fastuca