Mega Maniac at the Indy Nationals

It was last minute, and totally unplanned.

But I told you that came about in the last entry, so no more to say about that.

Considering that racing was not high, or even located on my to-do list, the trailer had been mostly unloaded, of tools, spares, etc. The only tools we had were inside of  a 10" X 10" cardboard box containing a few miscellaneous tools that Keith had brought.

There were a total of about 140 or more cars there. Only the top 128 would go into the eliminations. We ran a 9.96 and were 17 out of the 128. Not bad for a car whose engine hasn't been apart in nearly a year. And in all honesty, we could have run faster.

In fact, the motor is still sealed from our record run last year in Las Vegas. So we were hoping that we wouldn't need to tear down. We could do it, but we didn't have spare gaskets, and would have needed to borrow tools.

But fortunately/unfortunately, the track conditions saved us from a tear down. We were clearly running well enough to get second place in Class, but the bald spots on the poorly prepared track caused us to spin the tires (happened only twice before in the car's long history) and we lost the race and were eliminated in class.

On Friday, when eliminations got under way, we drew Jeff Taylor again. And Jeff always seems to really hit the tree hard when we run against him. He knows that we are no pushover, and that he had better play his "A" game. Keith had a .009 reaction time. (Pretty sporty when .030 is about the average for all racers. But, wouldn't you know it? Jeff had a perfect .000 light. So we went out in the first round. Oh Well. At least we got to race. And once again, neither the driver nor the car were an embarrassment.

Here is a video of our 9.96 run, which came in the first round of Class, which also was the last round of qualifying. This run, although impressive, was done running less than a 1/4 mile at full throttle. I wont say where on the track the brakes went on, but it was before the finish line.

 



 The car is still for sale. It is still capable of winning, and it will be sad to see it go. But it is time. Both Chris and I knew that a time would come when it would be sold, and that was OK with both of  us.  It would cost a lot more and take a great deal of time to build a car capable of what this car is capable of doing. $85,900 is a very fair price for this car.

 

See you at the Sports Nationals in Columbus at the end of the month. Cash, or  a Cashiers Check will allow you to take this gem home with you.

 

Next post will include some comments about the nature and character of most Drag Pak owners.

 

God Bless, and Safe Racing!

 

David