Finally home from the Westward Journey

It has a been a while since my last blog, but traveling a round trip of more than 5000 miles and participating in five different events (Two NHRA Nationals and three NHRA Divisional events) has been pretty hectic and frankly, I have chosen to sleep rather than post.

But I am now home, and after a several hour nap this afternoon will catch things up here.

We start the adventure at Maple Grove Raceway, in Reading PA. This was our first race with the new engine and with our electronics working properly. I may have blogged about this event previously, so I won't belabor it here. We were top qualifier with a 9.85 in C/SA. We got a horsepower hit, but frankly we had no idea the car was going to be that fast. We broke out in the eliminations, thinking we would run slower due to the air, time of day, etc, having dialed a 9.88 we ran a 9.80 flat.. Ooops. Once again, we had no idea what this car/motor combination was capable of doing.

We stopped home for a few days, about long enough to do the laundry, and set off on the west coast portion of the trip.

Our first stop was Noble Oklahoma where it rained a lot. We ran our qualifier run, and then got pushed out to Monday, and were once again Top Qualifier. On Monday, we finish things up by winning Stock Eliminator.

On to the Las Vegas Nationals. We ran in Super Stock JA (SS/JA) since they were not running class for stock and we thought a record might be available. We qualified 12th out of 117 cars. But we were eliminated in the first round by a car much faster who we couldn't see coming and got around us. It was close, but not a win. So back to Stock.

The next week was the Las Vegas Divisional race, and we were back in Stock. We ran in B/SA and were once again Top Qualifier (If you are keeping count, we have been top qualifier in the last three races where we ran in Stock.) at 1.422 under (Las Vegas is an elevated track so we didn't get horsepower for this run). We went four rounds deep in eliminations, and were only a couple of races away form winning it all. But it is a combination of a good car, good driver and good luck, and although we had the first two, we ran out of the third.

Then on to Pomona for the World Nationals where we again ran Stock (B/SA) and once again were Top Qualifier at 1.241 under our index of 11.25. If we had run 1.25 under the index, we would have gotten additional horsepower for our combination, but once again we avoided the dreaded instant horsepower penalty. We ran good, and Keith was having a real good time putting on some great reaction times, moving us up through the eliminations. We ran good in round 1 and 2. Then,in the third round, we ran against one of the blown mustangs. It too had a world champion driver, four timer Jeff Taylor, and we knew it was a fast car. We got the start first as we dialed under the mustangs dial. Keith cut a .0016 light and won on a double break out, meaning that we both ran fast than our dial, but we ran closer to ours than he did to his. So we won. Fourth round was a bye, so on to the first round. Our next race was another close one, but we won on another double breakout where we were .020 under our dial, and the other car was .050 under. Our next run was the semi finals against Dallas Glenn. We knew Dallas was good on the tree, and we just hoped we would get to the line first. Both cars were in the staging lanes under the tower and ready to run on Sunday, when the race was called for the day due to curfew, and moved to Monday. Had we run Sunday night, I think the result would have been different, but on Monday, Dallas had a very nice .004 light, and Keith hit an -.002 RED. We knew we needed a good light, and Keith was pretty close to .000, unfortunately on the red side of it, but it was good race, and we probably would have lost even if Keith had smoked the tree.

So we come home with a third place at the World Nationals. Top qualifier at four Stock events in a row, a Class win at Maple Grove, and Stock Eliminator win at Noble Oklahoma. Not too bad for a car that only a couple of months ago, couldn't run the index at Denver!

Now we are finally home again, and Drag Racing is currently on the back burner.

David