The long awaited, much anticipated kick-off of the 2020 American Nostalgia Racing Association ANRA season took place on August 21, 22, 23 at the famed Auto Club Famoso Raceway.
I just got off the phone with my buddy Dragster Jeff and one of the things he said to me was "it's really really hard just to load up your stuff, haul it out there, unload all your stuff, go racin', then load all your stuff back up and get home safe with everything in one piece. You just don't understand how hard it is to actually WIN one!" Amen to that, brother!
We are extremely grateful that all the work paid off and everything came together- culminating in the win in the Hot Rod class.
To Jeff's point- it's hard. Stupid hard. Here's how the weekend started: Wednesday, me and Kenny "the nuke" went out to storage and picked up the motorhome thinking we were getting a real early start on the load-n-go... so Kenny hooked up the race car trailer and plugged in the in-line brake controller https://www.curtmfg.com/dm/echo-mobile-brake-controller I have been using, and when I tried to check it on the phone app it would not pair. Further inspection uncovered NO power to the brake controller. Now, I have been using this thing behind the motorhome for about a year, and supposedly it picks up power from the 12v accessory pin on the 7 way connector on the motorhome, right?! Suddenly, no power. Must be a fuse. I decided to tow it home without the trailer brakes (a couple miles) and troubleshoot at home. Long story short, we could not find a fuse that fed that circuit. I mean under the hood, under the dash, under the bed, under the stars...nada.
Well, I have an awesome mobile RV tech named Matt https://www.matsonrv.com/contact who had recently done some repairs so I texted him and asked if he knew of another fuse box hidden somewhere. He responded he'd be up here in the morning and find it. So Thursday morning after 2 hours of looking we concluded we will never find it. So let's pull a new 12v hot lead to that pin in the 7 way plug and call it macaroni. Boom! Matt crawled under the bumper, and of course there was no access to the back side of the plug, so remove the plug from the frame, riveted of course, and pull the plug apart and guess what?! THERE WAS NEVER A HOT LEAD TO THAT PIN! That's right. For the 1 year I have been pulling that trailer on that motorhome, the darn brake controller has been pulling power off of the little brake-away system battery on the trailer! Drag racers are so dumb. Anyway, we got that squared away finally and the leisurely load up was now more of a rush. Me and my wingman Barry (not Dan) were committed to getting on the road at 7AM Friday since the gates were set to open at 9 AM. A new COVID related thing I guess.
We did get on the road by 7:30 Friday morning and rolled into "the patch" around 10:30 to find absolutely no lines, no backup at the gate, no waiting. We rolled right in and found our friends Chuck (if you don't share your toys...) and Cindy who had saved us a pit stall. We were located just 3 rows from the lanes and had space for Kenny the Nuke to roll in with his airstream, and parking for day-tripper Dave the wrench Lee as well. Chuck and Cindy weren't running The Hook this weekend, they literally came out to camp out and cook us a smoked rib dinner on Friday night. Seriously great friends! I mean they hauled out the https://www.theorioncooker.com/ smoker and fired up the best dinner ever...smoked baby backs complete with a pot of beans, pasta salad and dinner rolls. In fact we had a couple of great dinners out there and were able to enjoy the time with some other Flying Pig Regulars- Woollybear with his badass D-Gas Nova and Gankster Frankster and a couple part timers Ricky and Randy with the beautiful mint green Camaro.
When qualifying came around on Saturday it was, well, weird. The raging wildfires in California had been going for a few days and most of the state was blanketed with heavy smoke and falling ash. Literally yellowish sky and the acrid smell of smoke hanging in the air. So we made our 2 qualifying runs on Saturday and had good consistency at 10.655 and 10.659. The weird thing was that was a good 1/10 second slower than what the weather station was saying. Seems that the weather station can not pick up the ash in the air. Those ash molecules won't burn in your engine and they are replacing oxygen in the air. Net: the car slows down a bunch!
When Sunday dawned the air was quite a bit improved. There were even some patches of blue sky. I'm guessing a few people got caught off guard by the improvement in performance and missed the dial-in a bit on that first round of eliminations. anyway, we dialed a 10.63 for round one and I won a double breakout affair with a 10.61 on my 10.63 dial. I also cut a .001 light, which looks good on the time slip but is clearly only 2/1000 of a second from a foul so...on to round 2.
In round 2 my opponent fouled, I saw his red light so I ran it out the back door to a 10.56 giving a real indication of the improved air. So that information helped a lot and we dialed 10.58 for the rest of the day. The rest was kind of a blur as we marched through the field tallying up 6 round wins and a big ol' ANRA trophy! The final round was an awesome race against long time tough competitor and super nice guy Tony Chivington. It was a blast to yuk it up with Tony in the winners circle.
While I was consumed with keeping the winning going in the Flying Pig Mustang I unfortunately didn't have time to see what Woollybear and Ricky were doing. Rick went to the semi final in Sportsman an incredible accomplishment in his rookie season. And Woollybear qualified number 2 in D-Gas and rode that pony 4 rounds to the semis in a class that boasts some of the toughest drivers out there. Big congrats to both of those boys!
