September 5, 2007

The key to success in drag racing boils down to two things, consistency and making less mistakes than your competitors. I'll address the later first.

Sunshine Drag Strip is the winningest drag strip in the country. The track holds more NHRA Division II championships and consecutive championships than any other. When you race here, you race against the very best of the best. These guys make very few mistakes. They will eat you for lunch and spit you out if you make even the slightest slip up. So this part of the equation is very difficult to achieve.

Consistency is also a two part affair. First is driver consistency and the second is the consistency of the car. Our car right now, even though it is slow, is deadly consistent. Hooray, we have part of the equation licked. As a driver I'm still working on my consistency but I can see light at the end of the tunnel. I'm still getting quicker reaction times but I expect they will level off soon as in the past two weeks I've had to add .068 more delay in my delay box just to keep from red lighting. To no avail, I still went .006 red tonight after adding another .015 delay to the box from what I had in it at Bradenton. I'm chopping the tree down and not even using an ax.

Tonight I took the car to Sunshine for the Wednesday night test and tune and tried to qualify for the Top Dog quickest 8 car shootout. Well, it took a 5.12 ET to make the Top Dog field so that was out of the question. I really wanted a few hits at the tree and attempted to figure out why the car is slow. In Bradenton we discovered that the butterflies on the carb weren't opening all the way so that adjustment was made but it still ran the same. Go figure???

I got two passes in, a 5.83 and a 5.84. Nothing to write home about but they were very consistent (only .007 apart) especially when you figure that the relative humidity jumped from 56% to 66% between runs. Tomorrow I'm going to get together with my engine builder and transmission builder to try and figure this out. The car should run in the 5.30 zone so it's a full half second slow in the eighth mile (which is light years by our standards).

We're going to give it a hard shot this Friday night. Kris Nelson offered to video tape our runs so we can slow motion the run to try and find out what's happening and explain why we are running slow. That's something I wanted to do anyway, then post the video on the website. Stay tuned.