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A WIN-DY WEEKEND AT SHAKY TOWN Boy it’s a tough life livin’ the dream as a full time drag racer. I’m sitting here in a freebie hotel room at the Sheraton Four Points Hotel in Monrovia, Los Angeles (plug, plug… thanks Debbie!) and now I get to write a race report about how we took the win at the Excitement Nationals at Shakespeare County Raceway last weekend. It’s hard but someone’s got to do it… So what do you all think of our new website? Pretty fancy-schmancy looking around here now, huh? We certainly got plenty of positive feedback at the races and your comments have been passed onto the good people back at Expert IT. We also had a very successful and thankfully damage-free weekend at the races at the meeting where last year we wrecked two engines and generally had a pretty crappy time. Take a minute here and I’ll tell you all about it. When I wrote my last race report we had just found the full extent of the damage from our broken pushrod at the Easter meet. With a few repairs skillfully executed by Dave that block was ready for action once again and he turned his attention to putting together one of our new BAE forged blocks. Of course taking all the new pieces out of the boxes and expecting them all to fit together was never really going to work. Due to a couple of concerns about clearances we decided that though we may want to put in some test passes this weekend on the BAE motor if we got the chance, we would race on the trusty old KB. While Dave continued to put the shiny new motor together the rest of the crew put the car back together in its Easter form. Taking advantage of the opportunity to start up at our new workshop we had the motor fired up on the Wednesday prior to the race and by Thursday evening the Nemesis rig was loaded up and ready to roll for what should be its last outing. That’s the plan anyway; if we can have the new trailer ready for the next race. It will be worth the effort just to stop you all from asking where it is! The American Car Imports team hit the track on Friday lunchtime on a very wet and windy day. Luckily for us the rain abated for long enough for us to get the awning up and our kit underneath it without getting it all drenched. Luckily for us too Darren, Martin, Paul and Cat from the Time Machine team were around to help us put our awning up in the strong wind and stop the whole thing being trashed before we even started. Cheers guys. Being able to test the motor before we go to the races is a new experience for me and it means all the jobs we perhaps used to leave to do at the track we have to do at the shop so we can crank the old girl into life. So when we got to the track we were better organized than we have been in the past and by 5pm we were all set up, sheltered from the wind and rain, the car was ready to rumble, the beer was chilled and cracked open and we were waiting for Linda to arrive and cook tea for us. She duly did so and whilst we were sitting around stuffing our faces there was an almighty crash and we all thought the poor old awning had creaked its last creak and gone off to canopy heaven. We were confused to rush out off the trailer and find everything just as we had left it but disappointed to see the it was our friends at Turner Racing’s awning which had flipped right over their trailer. Looking at the weather conditions that night we wondered not only if we would get to race at all over the weekend but if judgement day had finally come and we were all going to get sent to hell for all our racing related mischief from the last years… Sure enough on Saturday the weather was still bad and although some of the sportsman racers got runs in and we did get as far as the staging lanes it was not to be and the weather meant that both of the day’s qualifying sessions had to be cancelled. Apart from warming the car up before we went out to try and run we had done nothing all day and the car was still completely ready to go. So as bored racers are prone to do everyone had a sherbet or two, honed their gaming skills at the PlayStation road show, talked nonsense all night about how racing was much better in the old days and then went to the disco. Much fun was had with the all the track marshals and staff, the Turner’s crew and my best buddy Phil, who dropped not only jaws with his antics and gave everyone except the poor couple trying to have a quiet moment to themselves a real good laugh. On Sunday the conditions looked more promising and eventually, after a lot of delays, we did actually get on to the track to make a run. The weather over the week prior to the meeting had really hampered the track preparation and the racing surface was clearly going to provide us with a challenge for the remainder of the weekend. We didn’t get it quite right and violent tyre shake sent Dave off toward the opposite lane, then back over towards the wall. His experience really showed as he kept the car under control just when we were starting to fear our new pipe was going to get all bent and twisted and then wisely shutting it off to card a 7.645 at 119.05 mph. Amazingly everyone else fared worse than us and that run gave us the provisional number one spot! All the Top Methanol contestants suffered from the dreaded tyre shake and Rob Turner had shake bad enough to break the axle mounting plates on his car putting him out of qualifying while the team effected the repairs. As our crewman Phil was cleaning the sump out after the run he found some lifter needle rollers in the oil. We suspected these may have been left over from the damage at the Easter race and it had just taken a run to get them out of the oiling system. To be certain we pulled off the blower and rocker gear and took out the lifters and sure enough they were still fine. It is amazing that despite totally stripping the block and cleaning it out with the proper brushes the little critters still found somewhere to hide but we were relieved that everything was OK and soon our new toy was ready for another trip down the quarter-mile. The track had started to come around a little and the changes to the tune up we made were obviously in the right direction when the dragster got on with it, shook a lot less and recorded a 5.762 at 245.90 mph to keep hold of the number one spot. This brought a huge cheer from the crowd and it was really special to drive down the track in the tow car and listen to all that applause. Thanks folks; that really makes it all worthwhile for the crew. On that run Dave also recorded his first .4 light for a while asking a few people to cruelly ask if we had gone over to the new American system where .000 is now a perfect light. The turnaround went smoothly this time and by 8pm we were ready to go for the our first round bye run in Monday’s eliminations. Phil cooked another fine barbecue for us all and then plied us with yet more of his wife’s most excellent homemade cakes. I wonder if she can brew beer too… It was great to see the sun shining on Monday morning and we took advantage of our bye run to try a few more tune up changes which worked out well when, despite a bit of tyre shake at the top of first gear, the car laid down a strong 5.696 a 252.81 mph, just .02 mph off of our existing track speed record. It seemed that the seal under the blower was not too good as the motor breathed out a little oil at the top end of the track so we pulled it off during the turnaround and resealed it. Everything else looked fine and just to make sure we didn’t get too relaxed the most senior member of our team tested us out by putting the idler pulley bearing on back to front so that the blower belt started falling apart on the warm up. Well he said he was testing us out anyway. Personally we think he just screwed up. Soon we were ready to go against our semi-final opponent Doug Ripley in the CC Racing funny car. We knew we had the performance advantage and experience told us this was not the time to be playing with the tune up so we left everything the same, Dave took it easy with the driving and we beat Doug comfortably with a 5.710 at a chutes-out 235.60 mph. Our new carbon brakes really work well as Dave took the first turn off and had the car on the scales before we even arrived saving us valuable time because we only had an hour to get ready for our final against Doug Bond’s Shell backed dragster. The super crew of Dave, David, Linda, Ricki, Mike and Phil worked brilliantly, as they had done all weekend, and had the car turned round, fired up and ready to get it on in just 50 minutes. That is a real feat with a car of this nature and the amount of maintenance work we do each run. Excellent work team! Again we went for consistency and we certainly were consistent, using a 5.716 at 235.60 mph to take the win over Doug. A timing problem meant no time was recorded for him but he sure was running hard after us so we hope to see him make an official 5 second pass real soon. The event win took us past Rob Turner and into the lead of the MSA British Top Methanol championship for the first time since August 2000. I think that’s true anyway. For proper information please check out our man on the ground; Dave Alexander’s always accurate www.etmra.com. Considering the conditions we were faced with it was a relaxing, fun, encouraging and very successful weekend for us. Well done to Lee Childs of LA Performance Racing for putting on the Ultimate Power Drag Racing Series and keeping drag racing happening at Shakespeare County Raceway this year. Thanks to all the fans who made our weekend all the more enjoyable and in particular Dennis for his continued support and great photos. A huge thank you to Wendy Baker for the most excellent chocolate cake and to Tony for all the doughnuts. Also special mentions to Andy Robinson and Gary Burgin for all of their continued help. Once the race was done I hopped on a plane over here to LA to see my fiancée
Jennifer and to collect some more parts to keep the ACI machine running. And
that pretty much brings me back to where I started and I’ve wasted quite
enough of my holiday already writing to you all thank you very much so I’m
signing off. See you all at the Main Event in a couple of weeks I hope. You
know what to bring…
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