Nostalgia Drags

It's been a while since I've given a proper update and here we are smack dab in the middle of the '09 season. With Gabe getting hitched and making a brand new human, his season doesn't exist. I'm in the midst of my busiest catering season and Graham's wagon has been a soggy noodle up until last week. Alas, a soldier prevails. Dangerous Chris Carlson has been a veritable army of one, running the points program at Thunder Mtn. this year. He's been plagued with transmission problems, only getting two gears for the first three weekends but still managed to come in first place on one of his outings putting him in second place so far in Pro.

Last week we thrashed on Graham's car and put my old 318 Poly and push button 727 in place of his old running gear. It now pulls hard, gets every gear and smokes the tires. Can I get a hell yeah?! We also added a whole slew of hard parts to our race trans including a new reverse valve body and, with some minor tweaking, we finally got third gear.

So we ventured out early Friday for the Mission old time drags, our absolute favorite race of the year. It's like a huge weekend party with tons of cool people and ridiculously slick cars and a side of drag racing thrown in for good measure. Demonaco pulled as hard as she ever has producing a record breaking 11.33 @ 117 mph, we were stoked....to say the least. Unfortunately, a weak battery and excessive cranking absolutely melted our starter while sitting in the staging lanes. We pushed to the side and thrashed like mad men to swap in our spare starter but the over-efficient NHRA staff managed to run our class without us. With everything ship shape for Sunday we did our final qualifying pass and set our dial-in. Then we got the bi for our first run and the car slowed down almost a second. Perplexed, we assumed that I could have shifted poorly and we went to the second round. This time I nailed an .024 light and shifted like a champ but the car went slow. We then noticed that the #8 spark plug wire had worked itself loose. Oh well, that's racing. It gave us a chance to sip some cold ones in the shade and watch some kick-ass drag racing. Graham raced the 330 with his fresh new/old combo and ran a best time of 16.83 with all the seats and spare in the car. He broke out in the first round and got a chance to join me and the hooligans at the end of the track. Fantastic weekend over all and everyone made it home in one piece.