The past couple of weekends have been great experiences for me and Chris. We have had 9 races so far this season and have won a round in 7 of those races. Also, we haven’t lost in first round in 7 races in a row! Not only have we had luck on the line, but we have gone to our first National event and even raced out of the country! No wonder drag racing season in my favorite time of the year!
Chris and I were determined to make it to a National event this year. Seattle is only a little more than an hour drive from our home, so it seemed like the perfect event. Parking was quite the run-around. Chris parked the trailer in line on Sunday and went back to the track on Wednesday to move it into a pit. Although it took a lot of energy on Chris’s part, it seemed to work well for the crowd of people looking for a pit. We pitted with Chuck Linne and Rick and Gladys Dearinger, some of our friends from the Pacific Northwest Super Comp Association. Thursday was tech and racing started on Friday!
Our first test pass was plagued by that horrible stumble that we’ve had for months now. Chris spent time on the phone with the carb guy in Michigan trying to figure it out. I was convinced there had to be something else wrong, but had no idea where to start. Rick came over to see what was going on and imparted some wisdom on our poor souls. He found small piece of rubber stuck in the needle valve. This rubber prevented the valve from closing and consequently flooded the engine on the line. However, since it was rubber, sometimes the debris itself closed off the valve. This is why our problem was so inconsistent and extraordinarily hard to track down. Rick fixed our horrible problem and we haven’t had a single stumble since!
Staging Against Ty in Round Two
Our other time run was smooth and provided some great data. Chris and I were quite nervous for our first round at such a big event. We got up at the crack of dawn and headed to the track to get ready on Saturday. When we arrived we found out that Super Comp wouldn’t be racing until 5pm. We arrived at the track at 7:30am and had friends coming to watch around 10, as we assumed that’s when we would be racing. We told everyone to stay home for a couple of hours and Chris and I sat back for a long day. When first round FINALLY came around, we accidentally paired up with our good friend Rick. I tried really hard to avoid lining up next to him, but unfortunately it didn’t play out like I had hoped.
But, the cards were in my favor that round and I beat Rick on a wonderful pass, with a .003 reaction time. Our second pass obviously did not have the same luck. We were paired up against Ty Anderson and I had another great reaction time off the line(.010). However, it could tell immediately off the launch that something was wrong. About a two seconds into the run I reached down to see if it had shifted or not and as I thought, it had not. I shifted the car into second gear, but unfortunately I heard the rev limiter hit and knew I had to get out of the run. Chris and I got back to the pits to find out that we had a pretty serious CO2 leak. Without CO2 the car won’t go on the stop and won’t shift. Although we only made it to second round, we couldn’t have been more pleased with our progress. We won a round at our first national event!
Another Red Light in Mission
This past weekend we headed up to Mission, BC for an Association race and the Canadian National Open. Chris and I have never been to Mission, so we were excited for the chance to get up there. We did some testing on Friday evening and had an Association race on Saturday morning. We had a bunch of problems with red lights but were confident we could tackle the problem. We made it through first round on a lucky double red light — we were the least red. In second round we lost on another red light to Ed Hauter. On Sunday we made it through round one by with a perfect 8.900 and a 0.005 reaction time, and qualified number 1! But because we were being so cautious about red lights, we lost in second round on a holeshot. We finally determined that the red light problem was caused by the car hopping out of the staging beams on the line. But you’ll have to wait for Chris’s blog to hear about that one!
We have three more races left this season: Association races in Bremerton and Woodburn, as well as the Medford Divisional. Hope to see some of you out there!