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13/11/2003 SHOOTING THE BREEZE AND RUNNING IN THE 5.3s My last report found us in the pits of Pomona Raceway, at the Los Angeles County Fairgrounds prior to the NHRA Finals, having just made our way down from a race in Las Vegas and that's where this new tale of excitement begins. We had a kind of a quiet first two days in Pomona before the racing started. Pit space is much more limited there than in Vegas so we couldn't even put our awning up and we had already turned the car around in Vegas so there wasn't much to be done at all. Needless to say we managed to entertain ourselves exchanging war stories with the other assembled racers who also had very little to do. Before Linda, Ricki, Phil and team friend Cullen flew in from England on Wednesday night we had test fired the car, fixed a small fuel leak, covered up the car in case of rain and had the dinner on. All in all we were an example of shining domestic efficiency. We'd covered the car because the forecast for that night and the next few days included a lot of rain. However as one grizzled, sage, old racer said, the weatherman is the only person who can be wrong every day of the week and still get paid on Friday, so we hoped we would still get in a few passes down the legendary Pomona drag strip. On Thursday there was just one qualifying session scheduled for the alcohol dragsters and it went ahead right on time at 12:30 in the 75 degree sunshine. Our off-the-trailer set up in Vegas had worked well so we put the same tune up in, except with a few tweaks to the fuel system to account for the differences between the air at the two tracks. Vegas is over 2000 feet above sea level and the humidity percentage tends to hover in the teens. Pomona is 830 feet above sea level and the humidity tends to be in the 30-40 % range with temperatures in the 60-80 degree range. That means the air in Pomona is reasonably similar to what we are used to back home, so we were optimistic about making a good pass out of the box. Dave was wheeling the PlayStation 2 backed rail to what looked like a low 5.5 second lap when the blower belt gave up and the car slowed to a 9.244 at 82.79. It was hard to tell what went wrong from the start line because the belt nestled between the chassis rails rather than flew in the air, but once we got to the top end we knew exactly what had happened. Apart from a damaged cable or two, the only other damage found was a cracked rocker, which was soon replaced after a visit to Brad Anderson's place for a new one. We did get some useful data before the belt let go but unsurprisingly that performance left us out of the field and hoping that the remaining two qualifying sessions on Friday didn't get rained off. We found time to hit the bleachers and watch the first Top Fuel and Funny Car qualifying sessions which were highlighted by Tony Schumacher's 4.49-second pass in TF; the first of an incredible string of seven consecutive 4.4-second runs from the US Army car. Thankfully the weather forecast was wrong for Friday, as it would turn out to be all weekend. We were itching to go for our first run and get back in the hunt for what was clearly going to be another very tough field to crack. At a national event the TAD field is always 16 cars but with 25 serious competitors entered this weekend it looked as if it would be just as hard to get a spot on this ladder as it had been the week before in Vegas. Some things we had been trying out in the clutch department recently really didn't seem to be paying off so we went back to what we had found worked well at Santa Pod and Gardermoen earlier in the year. The car responded with yet another 5.51, this time at our best ever speed of 262.13 mph. The clutch set up made the car awkward for Dave to stage and he rolled into deep stage which, whilst perfectly legal, probably added about five hundredths to our elapsed time. Deep staging puts the car closer to the start line beam which means it is traveling at almost zero speed when it leaves the beam and sets the clock running. However, shallow staging (just nudging the car into the beam) gives you a small run up at the track before the clocks starts, lowering your elapsed time. Those few inches may sound insignificant but because they are at the start of the run where the speeds are much, much lower than at the end of the run they have a big effect (between three and ten hundredths of a second, depending on the acceleration of the vehicle involved). Taking all that into account we knew we had a set up that would run in the 5.4s and our 5.51 already had us in the field in the 15th spot. No damage at all was found in the pits. If we could just stop the car using any fuel or putting any wear on the clutch discs then we wouldn't need to work on it between runs at all it is running so sweetly right now! With some changes made to the clutch linkage to make Dave's life easier on the line, we headed back to the staging lanes under the floodlights ready to try and improve our time and stay in the field. By the time we made our pass we had already been put on the bump spot, and in the lane next to us Mitch Myers improved to a 5.45 to knock us out. Just behind him Dave crossed the stripe with a 5.479 at 248.34 to get back in the show and back into the 15th spot. Before we had even made it back to the pits Marty Thacker had put us on the bump. As soon as we were back we gathered round the radio we had tuned into the track announcements to hear how the rest of the class got on. One by one the people that could bump us out tried and missed but we had to wait for the very last run of the session by Gary Anderson (a too slow 5.77) to learn that we would be part of the quickest TAD eliminations ever at Pomona Raceway the following day. It really was an incredibly tense affair and, as we have seen this year in Top Fuel in Europe, it adds a lot of excitement to the qualifying show when there are more entries than slots in the field. This meant we had to turn the car around instead of drown our sorrows and the American Car Imports crew set about the task with relish and were soon all finished and eating yet another great meal that Jenn and Linda had prepared for us. You may have noticed that our speed was down on that run and analysis of the data later that evening showed that Dave had clicked off a little early in the November darkness. Putting together the first half of the 5.47 run with the second half of the 5.51 run gave us a 5.41 theoretical best elapsed time. The ladder had us against 2003 US champ Alan Bradshaw in the opener who had qualified with a 5.29 from his A/Fuel dragster. We dialed in a few changes that ought to give the car a bit more zip so that if Alan stumbled we would have a good chance of overtaking him. If he didn't, at least we should record a good number on the awesome Pomona pavement. Well Alan's car didn't stumble in the opening round on Saturday and he showed us the door with low ET of the race at 5.24. From early on it was clear we were going to lose but that we weren't all that far behind and hell, you'd have thought we'd won anyway when a 5.386 at 262.74 came up on the board and we all went wild. Down in the shut off area Bradshaw's crew were as excited about us after a great drag race between the US and European champs and actually asked us if they could take photos of our two teams together. It was a great way to lose and being first in the 5.3s was a magical way to end a magical season. We have won the British and European championships this year, as well as been the first European team to break into the 5.4s and the 5.3s and the first over 260 mph. What an awesome year… Some quick checks showed that the car hadn't sustained any damage on that historic pass so we decided to leave the maintenance work until Monday, enjoy the rest of the weekend's racing, and have an adult beverage or two. Kenny Bernstein won his last ever Top Fuel race over the quickest field ever (the bump spot was a 4.63) and Morgan Lucas fought it out for the TAD win in his last ride in the Darrien and Meadows car that will be driven by Ashley Force (daughter of John) next season. Del Worsham won Funny Car over his team mate Cory Lee, who some of you may remember as the driver of the second Budweiser Funny Car pilot at Santa Pod in the mid 90s. This meant that the traditional Worsham and Fink end of season party was better than ever and the ACI crew was there, right at the front of the crowd when they fired up their infamous, nitro powered margarita mixer. On Monday we turned the car around ready to use next season and stripped the engine to check it all over and replace the parts that were due to be swapped over. Because we hadn't put our awning up and had been tidying our stuff away each night in the trailer we were all finished and ready to go by teatime. After dinner when we sitting around relaxing, Linda fell from a chair in the kitchen trying to retrieve some paper towel and her arm was nastily twisted. Sure enough she had broken her wrist in three places. Since she was due to fly home the next day, they put a temporary cast on it at the Pomona Valley hospital and cleared her to fly home. Otherwise she would have had to stay in the US for another six weeks! So on Tuesday we dumped the tanks at the nearest KOA, dropped the truck off at a top secret location where it will be parked for the winter and the crew went back to LAX to fly home. Jenn and I are staying out here until Thanksgiving before heading home for our annual sponsors party in London where we get a chance to give them something back and thank them once again for all their valued support. We are planning to do some testing over here in the New Year before competing in the Winternationals in Pomona in February. Then we hope to do as many NHRA races as we can manage before shipping the rig back to England in time for the start of the FIA season at the end of May. This is an amazing opportunity for all of us to be out here and I can't wait to get back to the track next year and pick up where we just left off. I hope you'll all tune in and find out how we got along. Merry Christmas!
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