September 27, 2007

I arrived at Atllanta Dragway last night around 2:30am after a 9 hour drive from Clearwater. As you can see I wasn't the first in line by any means. There were 42 racers in front of me and this morning there were about 70 in line by the time they let us in the track at 11:00am.
The weather here is great. I woke up to 79 degrees and a relative humidity of 32.83 %. Just beautiful. There was a small threat of a few rain drops this afternoon but they never appeared.

Today is a testing and tuning day as official time runs begin tomorrow. It's a really good thing. After my first two time runs the best I could run was a 9.011 at 145.39 mph. I need desperately to pick up over a tenth. After calling Kris Nelson for some advise, I took the 189 jets out of the carb and leaned it out with 176 jets, lowered the tire pressure to 5 lbs and added 15 degrees more heat in the motor before pulling out of the staging lanes. The car responded well with an 8.78 and 8.81 ETs right at 150 mph. I was also knocking down the tree with a great .003 reaction time. Things are really starting to look up. Now it's just a matter of dialing the car in to the 8.90 index.

One of the benefits of going to big races like this is getting to see racers that travel who you haven't seen in a long time such as Gary Stinnet, Sherman Adcock and others. Some guys come to the test and tune sessions to work hard on getting their cars to run right and some guys come just to relax and get away from the blistering pace of everyday life. And then again, maybe some of us do both.

Thanks to the marvels of technology, Atlanta Dragway has a WiFi connection that allows me to update my blog from inside my motorhome at the track. How cool is that?