Swing and a Miss

Well we packed up the wagons last weekend and headed off for Osoyoos. It's a new 1/8 mile track and they were only running on Sunday. I spoke with the director and he told me that if we showed up on Saturday then we could get a bunch of hits in the afternoon. We arrived around 2:00 and there was nobody in sight. We paused for a safety meeting and somehow came to the ridiculous conclusion that we should drive five more hours and meet our friends from Wagons of Steel South in Mission who are racing in their first NHRA divisional race of the season. So I handed the tiller to Dangerous and proceeded to hit the cooler. We found the boys immediately at the track in Mission and proceeded to exchange stories and drinks. These divisional events are a big deal and we were more than out of our element. From the get go we were off to a bad start showing up on a Saturday afternoon and hoping to run on Sunday. They finally agreed to let us run in the super pro (electronics) category for the full price of the three day weekend with no qualifying pass. We said sure, why not, we've already driven ten hours, why not do one pass for $130.00. But it didn't stop there, the tech inspectors did not want anything to do with our behemoth and had no qualms about letting us know. Everything was wrong according to them and there was nothing we could do to fix it. We tried for several hours to prove them wrong but it was all in vain. Eventually we just gave up because no matter what we did they would always find something wrong. NHRA =1 WOSN= 0. We finally gave up, cracked some beers and watched some racing. Our Pal Gaffo won his first round on Sunday but put himself on the trailer with a red light in the second. It was fantastic to hang out with the Vashon Isl. crew and see their wheel standing stock eliminator car in person. Gaffo also writes for an on line magazine called Mopar Max under the fictitious name of Chris Barnes, and he was gracious enough to post some photos of our rag-tag team admitting defeat by the evil empire that is the NHRA. Our next race is scheduled for June14&15 at Thunder Mtn raceway. It should be a good one so pack up the camper and head on up.