Father’s Day Funny Car Classic

When I was a baby, I’m sure when my bottle was empty I started to cry. Well, many years later my bottle was empty and I did cry. Okay, I didn’t cry. I swore!

I spent 24 hours last week on my Spartan long weekend making things better in the car: new shifter switches, a NOS arming switch that actually armed something, all-around the car bolt tightening, oil change, things like that. I also got my empty NOS bottle refilled. Father’s Day Sunday was a real nice day, a few showers that slowed, but did not cancel, the racing. I got there early, anticipating a good turnout of cars and I was not disappointed. I had two crew this go-around: Ryan Pupulin and his friend Chad. These guys helped a lot, helping me get the car off the trailer, getting it prepped, checking tires, oil, etc. They even pushed me around in the staging lanes so I wouldn’t have to start the car just to travel 20 feet. Oh yeah, there was racing that day for me too.

The first time-trial was at 9:30, and using nitrous oxide, I pulled out a 10.82 at 124 mph. Hmmm. This was 4 mph slower and about 0.1 second slower than I did last time. Well, okay, this was the first run of the day, so who knows what’s going on. My next run was at 11:00, over 1-1/2 hours later. I told you there were lots of cars. This time I did 11.0 ET at 119 mph. Arrrgggghh! What’s going on here? I checked my NOS pressure and saw it was STILL about 650 lbs, the same it was two weeks ago, but knowing a little bit about pressure in a contained vessel figured pressure was there but there was no volume. In other words, the tank was almost empty. So I swapped it out. I thought we’d have another time trial because we usually have 3 or 4 on Sunday but because of the car count, the next round was eliminations! Arrrggghhh, again!

I dialed in at 10.8, pretty sure that it was the low NOS pressure that caused me problems earlier. In the race I could see I was ahead of my opponent in the next lane, so when I reached the top of the quarter I pulled off the throttle and actually hit the brake to SLOW DOWN! Since I was ahead and wasn’t sure about my dial, I did that so I could still win without breaking out, which would make me lose. You know what I mean. Well, I STILL broke-out by going to gol-darn fast! I did the quarter in 10.67 seconds. Miles per hour was down to 109 because of my slowing at the end. Based on my 1/8 mile performance, this would have been a 133 mph run and ET of perhaps 10.5 seconds. Wow was I flying! My 60 foot time was below 1.5 seconds, unheard of for a stock suspension with small tires. My reaction time was 0.512, 12-thousandths of a second away from a perfect run!

When I went to the tower to pay my $10 to get into a consolation round, I was told no consolation. Sorry.

Why? Because there were enough cars, they didn’t HAVE to run a consolation round! So after all the hours of prep, $40 of race fuel burned, a couple pounds of nitrous used, and going the fastest I’ve ever gone in this car, I still had to put the car up on the trailer!