1st round of eliminations

1st round of eliminations
Originally uploaded by Wagons of Steel North.

Nostalgia drags

Well our big weekend in Mission came and went and I can honestly say that I'm feeling a little boxing day sadness with it's conclusion. Mission is without question the coolest place to race, (for us hill-billies anyways) with their 24 feet above sea level elevation, concrete launch pad well past the 60 foot mark and the overall professional and somewhat intimidating manner that they run their facility. It sounds a bit ironic, but our twenty foot behemoth was a little fish in the big pool. This trip was also monumental for the team since we used my '67 Polara (Malbotia) as our new official tow rig to wrangle the race car all the way to the coast with only a flat tire on the trailer and running out of gas....both ways, woops. Apparently "E" really does mean empty. Oh well, the big car was in it's glory when we fed her a little leaded 100 octane, like big block junk food. The other first for the team was the debut road trip for Gabe's '65 Polara wagon as the hot floored support vehicle. Needles to say the entourage was quite a site to be seen and the high speed thumbs-up were ever present for the entire voyage. The turn out in Mission was insane and the cars were freakin' gorgeous, most of which appeared to be Mopars. We were mildly plagued with fueling issues as we tried to tune our big machine for sea level. According to all the big shooters with their weather stations in their enclosed trailers, the adjusted elevation was more like 1200-1400 feet. Which I pretty much don't understand at all, why can't they just tell me it's a bad air day and be done with it. Demonaco ran almost three tenths slower than Spokane and despite our multitude of jet swaps we finally decided to just run it and try and hit our number. We got three hits on Saturday then only one more qualifying on Sunday before eliminations. In an attempt to avoid the big red I staged as shallow as possible and ran a .124 reaction time for both of my passes. Unfortunately the Camaro I was up against was having a really good day and beat me by one hundredth of a second. Now that really puts the technical aspect of this wacky sport into perspective, regardless, a loss like that is still kick ass since it was so close and I didn't shit the bed. All said we had a killer weekend and once again didn't blow anything up, so all is well that ends well.

Polara Pat.