August 25, 2007

After getting rained out last night for the race at Sunshine, we were really hoping for better luck today in Bradenton. I arrived at the track around noon and the sky was clear and sunny. I unloaded the car bought a $10 test and tune run card and this is what the sky looked like just before I was supposed to run. A few minutes later mother nature took over the program and as you can see here, she hit pretty good.


However, being from Florida, we do learn that many times these are brief intermissions rather than program enders. As it turned out, by 4:00pm the rain had stopped, everything was dry and we were able to make one and only one time run. I hit the tree with a so-so .028 light but the shift linkage wasn't quite adjusted right and I didn't get high gear so I abandoned the run. It was OK though, as it was a quick fix and I anticipated losing first round then could buy back in to the second round. What a plan.

As it turned out, we were all in the staging lanes for round one, ready to race when it started raining again. This time it was all over for the day. Eventhough it rained, it was still a good day for marketing my sponsor, meeting new people and spending time with my crew chief, Paul Witting and his daughter Teresa. You know the old saying, "A bad day drag racing is better than a good day at work anyday".

August 24, 2007

The dictionary defines the word "thrash" as, "to beat soundly in punishment". We in the sport of drag racing use the word to mean "frantically repair or repair in a highly expeditious manner". In most cases it is definitely synonymous with the word punishment. Let me describe for you a thrash as I interpret the word.

Thursday night after work I loaded the trailer to take to work with me in preparation for the Friday night race at Sunshine. I had loaded everything except the car, which I drive down my driveway and into the trailer. It was 8:00pm when I sat in the seat, hit the starter button and all I heard was crunch, crunch, crunch whirrrrrr. I got out of the car and there were five or six flexplate teeth laying on my garage floor. If you read my last blog, you know that we had just put the transmission and torque converter back in the car etc., etc. Oh crap !!!! This feels like Deja Vu. That means I have to do it all over again and have the car ready to race in less than 24 hours.

Cough, cough...I was going to have to take a sick day to stay home from work on Friday and I was going to have to get the transmission out of the car Thursday night. All of which I did. I had the transmission out by 10:00pm and called it a night. Friday morning I went up to United Speed World, bought a new flexplate and had the car all back together again, loaded in the trailer race ready before 4:00pm Friday just in time to make it to Sunshine on time. Whew!! What a close one.

The dictionary defines the word "irony" as "an outcome of events contrary to what was, or might have been, expected". Let me describe for you irony as I interpret the word. No sooner had I loaded the car in the trailer than the sky opened up with a deluge of rain (3 or 4 inches worth), thunder and tons of lightning. The thunder was so loud it made my sliding glass door rattle. I have heard people use the expession "it's raining cats and dogs". Well, this afternoon it rained elephants and hippos. Looks like a hurricane doesn't it?

That's what it's like to be a drag racer. Maybe we can race tomorrow in Bradenton. As for tonight.... it's a Best NY pizza all the way and a couple Samuel Adams brewskies as I'm headed for my easy chair.

August 20, 2007

Over the weekend I finished up the car and I just took my good 'ole sweet time going over a lot of little details because we have two races this week. We're racing Friday night at Sunshine and Saturday night in Bradenton.

On Sunday, we were having a little cook out at the house with some family and the Wittings were going to come up and join us. As it turned out, I got a call from Paul late in the afternoon and he had just gotten out of the hospital. He took his girls boating early in the morning and they stopped on a reef to get out of the boat and cool off when he stepped on a sting ray. Ouch !!!! He was at work today, sore but OK. Paul said the tetnis shot made his arm hurt as much as the sting ray barb hurt his foot.

We run methanol alcohol in the race car and the stuff is very corrosive. As a result, you have to always pay particular attention to the fuel system and keep all of the components like the fuel pump, carb and regulator well lubed so that things don't stick or oxidize. I use WD-40 like it's going out of style but it works very well. I did take the fuel filter, regulator and carb apart just to check everything and make sure there were no problems. I did replace the needles and seats in the carb because I dicovered a small burr in the brass seats. I normally check these with a magnifying glass just because they are so sensative to a good running fuel system. When you think about it, it's hard to believe this little motor uses 189 main jets.

On the way home from work tonight I stopped and picked up a new tow ring and mounted it in the nose of the car. The old one was rusted and I wanted to beef it up from a 3/8" shaft to a 1/2" shaft. Sometimes more is better.

Tomorrow night I'm going to throw a coat of wax on the car, Armor All up the tires and we'll be ready for Friday night.

August 16, 2007

During my lunch hour today I picked up my repaired converter and freshened up transmission from CRT That's Steve with the big smile posing with my converter. While we were at it, we asked Steve to increase the stall speed from 5500 rpm to 6000 rpm. These small blocks just love the rpm and the car should leave like a banshee at that rpm.

No one ever said drag racing was all fun. It's a lot of work even though it's enjoyable work. This evening Paul Witting and I put the transmission and converter back in the car, installed the rear wing, the electronics tray and a variety of other little things. I'll finish up the wiring and fluids tomorrow morning and should have it all done and race ready before noon. That's me on the floor with my back to you bolting on the shifter cable bracket.

The next two weeks we are going to be changing up our schedule a little as we'll be racing at Sunshine on Friday night and in Bradenton on Saturday. Today I talked with the track manager at Bradenton Motorsports Park and we will be kicking off the Right Trailers Dead-On program there next Saturday night.

I'm really looking forward to having the car running at it's true potential which should be in the 5.20 zone in the eighth mile at Sunshine and in the 8.30 zone in the quarter mile at Bradenton. We'll see...

August 15, 2007

Well...I got a call from Steve at CRT yesterday and sure enough, we bent over the blades in the torque converter and broke a sprag. Thank goodness for warranties!!! Steve has also offered to check the transmission because there were metal particles in the converter and we want to make sure nothing in the tranny was damaged.

If I'm lucky I'll get everything back tomorrow but trying to make the race Friday night is very doubtful. We'll take it out next Wednesday and or Friday night (weather pending).

The long range weather forecast shows a potential Category 3 hurricane south of Espanola which may affect southern Florida by this time next week. We're keeping our fingers crossed that it dissipates.

August 11, 2007

This has been a long day. Paul Witting came up this morning to help test, then tear the car apart. The first thing we had to do was a leak down the motor to verify that our problem wasn't motor related. After three conversations with Kris Nelson at Nelson Competition and reviwing the results, we were thoroghly convinced that our problem is converter related. As a result, we extracated the transmission and converter as well as a bunch of other parts that were in the way. We also changed the oil, adjusted the valves and broke a spark plug in the head. We were able to extracate the spark plug also with no real problem. Hopefully with a trip to CRT on Monday, we can get the converter turned around by Tuesday or Wednesday and be ready to race next Friday night and finally get the car to run what it should. We expect it to run in the 5.20 ET, 130 mph range at Sunshine. That's a far distance from the 5.80 range that it just ran after putting the fresh motor in it.

August 10, 2007

As we couldn't race today because of our converter problem, we just went to Sunshine to take care of sponsor business, display the car and take some photos. Tonight we announced the Right Trailers' Dead On program for Super Pro and Pro racers at both Sunshine and Bradenton. It's a pretty good program that pays any racer that wins a round of eliminations $50 if they run dead on their dial in with a 0 or has a perfect reaction time. The program was well received by both the track management and racers alike.

I have to say, that from a racer standpoint, there we two things that really impressed me tonight. The first was that the race was won by John Mella, who at age 72 literally drilled the competition and never varied more than.01 from his dial in. On top of that, the crowd at Sunshine is probably the toughest gang of bracket
racers in the country and he beat them all including former national bracket champion Paul Dorn on his way to the final. It couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. I hope I can race like that at 72!!!

The second thing that really got my attention was the Junior Dragsters. There were 17 of them that showed up for first round. That's a good sized field of cars. One car was dialed in at 8.47 and ran over 70 mph. Keep in mind that's with a Briggs and Stratton lawn mower engine for goodness sakes. Impressive to say the least.

In talking to some of the folks that run these cars, they are spending $9000 plus for the dragsters race ready, which to me is just amazing for kids 8-16 years old to race. The clutches alone cost over $1000. Additionally, these kids are dead serious racers. Just wait until they hit the Super Pro class and most of them will be very, very good adult racers.

August 8, 2007

Well, today started out great. Mike Scott from Right Trailers came over to Clearwater to have lunch with me and Paul Witting in order to discuss our progress and develop some short as well as long range marketing plans. We're on a great track.

In the late afternoon we headed to Sunshine for the Wednesday night Top Dog Race. They take the quickest 4 dragsters and the quickest 4 bodied cars and run the 8 cars off in eliminations for $300. As it turned out, I qualified 4th and made the program.
My first time run was a 5.806 ET which was not speedy but very consistant with the previous Friday night. I had taken .015 out of the delay box and had a spectacular .005 reaction time. Boy was it hot though, 94.2° with a relative humidity of 47.29%, barametric pressure of 29.88 and (get this) a density altitude of 2715 feet. Geez, there was so little available oxygen in the air we were two-thirds as high as Denver. All you have to do to sweat is breath.

Time run number 2 the car picked up 2 hundredths to a
5.78 just like the previous Friday night. Wow, I was
starting to feel pretty good about my chances of winning
as I knew exactly how the car would run and I had
qualified. NOT!! I was bitten by the TDR (That's Drag
Racing) bug. All of a sudden the car slowed up
progressively on the next 3 runs. I think the converter
took a hit. To top it off I discovered (the hard way) a
loose wire to my electric water pump and the motor got
hot driving back after my last pass.

So...It looks like this weekend I'm yanking my transmission to get my converter back to Steve at CRT. Thank goodness he'll warranty it. Another day in the life of a drag racer. It sure beats work though!!!!

August 5, 2007

Today I had some minor maintenance to do to have the car ready for this week's Wednesday and Friday night races. I disconnected the throttle bypass and readjusted the fuel pressure both at the fuel pump and at the regulator. I'm hoping that this will really pick the car up ET wise. I think I was starving it for fuel. I also had to stuff the new oil absorbant pads into the new catch pan Will Bodley built for me.

After Friday night's embarrassing episode by leaving on the other guy's top bulb, I installed an extension to my dial in board with the letter "N" (for No)so the track will know that I want to opt out of the Cross Talk system and get my own top bulb even if I'm the faster car. This little addition is what the track requires and should take care of the problem.

Friday night at the track the generator in the motorhome was acting up and sputtering. We found a small hole in the fuel line but we were able to fix it right there. However, having that air in the fuel line it reacted similar to a PCV valve and sucked a lot of oil up into the air filter. As a result, today I had to take that apart as well and wash out all of the oil in the foam part of the filter. Now I just have to buy a new paper air filter and that's taken care of. Geez...it's always something.

Bottom line (as John Force would say), we're race ready.

August 4, 2007

We finally got to race last night as all the bad weather had cleared out of the area. We kept our schedule to go to Sunshine in St. Petersburg.

It was hot! It was humid and the track temperature was up over 120° at 5:00pm. The track was also slick and it wasn't hooking up that well.

I ran a 5.83 ET on my first pass with the new motor. Needless to say, I was disappointed in how slow the car was but I think I know why. The throttle by-pass has to go. My second pass was a 5.808 ET as the track had cooled off a little, down to 114°. Even though it was slow, I was consistent and I hit the tree hard so I had a -0.015 red light reaction time. Hey, I can always put more delay in the delay box.

First round rolled around about 8:00pm and the track was cooling off even more so I decided to dial the car to run a 5.78 ET and I rolled another .025 delay into the delay box hoping for a .015 reaction time. I was pretty pumped and felt confident I could give just about anyone a run for their money.

However, no one told me that the track runs a Cross Talk system in eliminations. I was the faster car in Round one with a 5.78 dial and my opponent had a 6.13 dial. When I left the line I left on his first yellow bulb because that's how the system works. Needless to say I got a -.375 red light and my night was over. If that had been my top bulb I would have had a .015 reaction time and I ran a 5.788 on my 5.78 dial (Dead On).

Live and learn I guess. Now I just have to make a decision if I'm going to use the cross talk function in my delay box or fix a way to put an "N" on my dial in board to opt out of the cross talk. Seeing that I use heavy frame distance only glass for racing which aren't bifocals, setting the delay box is difficult so I think opting out is the way for me to go.

Having a new sponsor is pretty cool because I have a purpose to go introduce myself to other racers and the interaction is really great. Drag racing is very much a social sport as well as being super competitive.

Rick Townsley (above) used to work with us at GE and goes racing with us quite often. Rick helps out with the car and is responsible for most of these photos. He does a great job with them. As you can see, he also has that "Hollywood" smile.

August 1, 2007

Tonight we were ready to start the Fall racing season by racing for Top Dog at Sunshine Drag Strip in St. Petersburg, however, Mother Nature just would not cooperate. As you can see, we were rained out with a large band of storms that waved through the area. Disappointed maybe but we're not discouraged.

In case you're wondering about Top Dog, on Wednesday nights at Sunshine it's basically a test and tune night. They take the 4 quickest full bodied cars and the quickest 4 dragsters then run them off for a $300 cash prize. With a dragster, sometime you can get in the program with a 5.50 ET and sometimes you have to run quicker than 5.10 to get in. It just depends on who shows up.

We're really looking forward to racing the first bracket race of the Fall season this Friday night. We're pumped, our sponsors are pumped and our friends are excited as well. Look for a big batch of photos after Friday night's race.