Saturday morning we headed out at 5:30 AM. Yikes, it's been a while since I was up at 4 AM on purpose.
Since I rarely go fishin', I guess drag racing is the only thing I get up that early for! But that's what we needed to do...the Summit race was being combined with the West Coast Hot Rod race so with that many cars and classes the racing was scheduled to kick off a little earlier than usual. Fortunately, B-Dawg was able to keep breakfast down this time. ;) So the sunrise drive over to "the Patch" was pretty uneventful.
We breezed through tech, and got camp set up, and then it was time for our first time runs. I was sweating it a little bit since this was the first pass on the re-built transmission, and I was hoping for no slippage down track. (Driving to tech I was able to hit all three forward gears so that was a good sign). It all worked out just fine, I ran a 10.47, which was spot on for the conditions. It was like we never missed a beat. Thanks to JC and Dan for doing the overtime thrash to get the tranny back in Friday night! You guys rock!
Dan made his first time run and despite running out of gas ran an 11... When I say running out of gas I mean the tank was half full but since he has a stock fuel tank the pickup is in the front of the tank, hence under acceleration all the fuel rushes to the back and none gets picked up by the fuel system, which starves the engine of fuel and sputter-pop you go. When I say acceleration I mean the Camaro had both front wheels off the ground! We call that "hangin' the hoops" as yer ol dad Gray Baskerville would say. So Dan is shopping for a fuel cell this week! Oh yeah, and a firewall 'tween the trunk and the passenger compartment to meet tech/safety requirements. It's either that or fill that stock tank to the brim so the stuff has nowhere to go!
Dan is running the camaro in the Sportsman class which has a low limit of 12.0 seconds, so Dan has to slow the car down for that class. He made some adjustments to the throttle linkage and slapped a 12.00 dial on the window. Then he proceeded to go out and WIN his first round of drag racing. Don't that beat all!
Me on the other hand...running in the Pro class dialed a 10.48 and proceeded to lose the round by 3/10,000 of a second. Yep 3 ten thousandths of a second. Can you believe those beams can measure to that 4th digit past the decimal point?
Dan returned for round 2 but lost on a close one to another rookie driver.
So, we wrapped up the racing for the day and settled into the BBQ mode. We had way too good a selection of munchies as usual, and I had marinated some fat juicy sirloins for dinner. Like the man said you can't always run good but you can always eat good. Or something like that! Anyway, we whipped up some baked beans, salad, and some awesome BBQ sirloins and ate like winners! Oh yeah and Mrs. SLO Racer's brownies!! Yeehah. At some point the twins split for Deepa's place, the wanderer wandered and The Wrench and I decided it was time for a nap...
Oh, but just for Barry, here's a picture of his perfect hood being used as a bar!
SLORacer. Out.
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