Down the track again and again......

Finally.... The Mega Maniac (aka The Drooze Mobile) got going in the right direction..

Not that we didn't have things going in the right direction at times in the past, but this time we came away with a lot more confidence, and a pretty good feeling.

It didn't start out great though..... We ran our first qualifying round, and the car wouldn't shift.... This was a "not so good" feeling on the first day. We began to wonder of the gremlins were still following us or not. It is an electronic shift transmission. First we checked the wiring, and it all seemed good as we used a metal and a continuity tester and everything seemed good in the wiring. .... So we started checking other things, and even got under the car and removed the pan on the transmission, so we could remove the first to second, and second to third shift solenoids.... Everything there looked good. So, back under the car to put them back. And we began to check all of the wiring again, and found a semi-broken wire. We fixed that and we were no longer..... shiftless!

Oh, did I mention that we weren't burning out coil packs? We weren't! And that was a happy state of mind when we realized that the coiling burning problem was gone.

So, we skipped the second round of qualifying while we solved the tranny issues, and planned to run in the later qualifying run for those who hadn't yet had two runs... A good plan, but the rains came and the third round of Stock Qualifying was cancelled.

No problem, since we were already qualified. But it would have been nice to get a good run and get logs from it.

Rain stopped, so we talked about our concerns over the soft starts we were having, since a good hard start is better/quicker. We had some questions about our torque converter, and ATI was there, so we went over and bought a new converter. And we came back, put the car up in air on jack stands, and climbed under to remove the transmission completely and take out the torque converter. After about a half hour the rains came back, not too hard, so we tried to keep working under the car. But then the skies opened, so we had to get out from under, and wait for the rain to stop. After a few minutes, it stopped and we got out some dry pads to get back under the car. Then while putting the transmission back in place, after putting the new torque converter in, the rains came again and they we really hard, and lasted a lot longer. We talked about waiting for morning, but ultimately decided that we were already wet and cold, and the forecast for the next morning was even colder, plus we would run pretty early, so we got back under the car to finish.

We were short six bolts because we made a small, but necessary, change. So we went to Walmart (after all, that was the only place open at 11:30 at night) and looked for bolts that were big enough. In one bolt assortment, that cost $5.95, we found four of the bolts that we needed. These were the most important, and we figured that we might get the other bolts from one of the other racers. So first thing in the morning, we finished bolting things up, and were ready to run Class.

First round of class, we were up against a pretty nice car, a Corvette who had actually run a bit faster than we expected to run. Keith Lynch, our driver and Crew Cheif, got a very nice start and held on to win the first round of Class. Cooooool! We actually beat another car! The second round of Class, we had a bye due to a coin toss we won. Luck, it seemed had come our way. So the finals of class was our car again another new Challenger. We knew he was fast, and we haven't gotten four runs on this engine and electronics, so we didn't expect to win. Keith once again got a great start, and we were ahead for a bit, but then the faster car passed up. He could have let up on the accelerator, still beaten us handily, and not have affected the horsepower for the 5.7 Challenger, but he didn't.

He ran full out and as a result, for the third time, this car has shown no respect for the other Drag Pak owners and without a good reason, gotten added horspower to our combo.. And THIS comes after this particular owner had called when we ran a good time previously (the only good run we had ever had) and begged us NOT to do what he has now done three times.... Too bad, pretty soon we will only be able race against supercharged Mustangs, and Crate Motor Mustangs who know how win and still keep the indexes safe. But apparently, he just doesn't care, and only wanted us to protect the index, so he could blow it up...

But enough moaning.

We then waited for Sunday morning to run in eliminator class, where you dial a number and try to run closer to it, than your opponent does to his number. We had no clue what to dial, so we picked a time 10.60, which was faster than we had run yet with these new electronics. And guess what? We ran quicker than 10.60, and so did the other guy, but we ran further under our number, so he got the win.

OK, no big deal. We just don't know what the car will do yet. But now, for the first time, we are building on the weekend, and will be at another race in two weeks where we will have a lot better idea of what our car will do. We know for sure that we should be much faster than we currently are. So now, all we have to do is to figure our what is slowing us, and fix it.

But, we got more good runs down the track, with logs, in the this weeked, than in a total of all our previous efforts. We got a number of previous runs, but never complete runs with logs.. So it was good, and go forward from here.

David