We hit the road at 5:30 Thursday afternoon with a core posse of Chris, Graham and myself with Demonaco in tow, bound for Bremerton raceway. The trip is a boring pull consisting of South to Spokane and West towards Tacoma, amounting to about an 8 1/2 hour drive with nothing but fast food in between. Graham was gracious enough to do all of the driving allowing me to do more important tasks like sample exotic small batch libations. We arrived just after 2:00 am and lined up behind some other keen racers.
A little shut eye then first in the gates at 8:00 am Friday morning. The wagons of Steel team showed up shorty after that and we all unloaded our rigs and did some final checks before getting the cars teched. Josephine II was looking bad-ass and we finally got to see what was going on under hood. 480 stroker you say with a big ass Dominator sitting on top like the toilet of the Gods. Were we nervous?
(Pat checks out the competition's cockpit)
Not really. Did we think we were going to get our asses handed to us? Yes. To our advantage this was the absolute first run for this car so there were bound to be issues to work out. Dr. Bigblock decided to take the inaugural run and we said "game on, we're not here for our looks and award winning personalities."
(C-body against C-body...US and Canada battle it out!)
We lined up at the lights and put a set of thunderous hammers down. JII pulled ahead for a second then I knew that I was going to run him down. Canada 1, USA 0. It turns out that the rev limiter in their car was coming on at 6000 rpm, not to good when you shift at 6400. Tough loss but we'll take all we can get. Our next match was against Matt Hattfield who is the primary driver for this car. Matt cut an astounding .002 light on me and did absolutely everything right but our battle hardened missile of death came alive and chased him down winning by barely half a bumper.
(Now thats racing!)
It was the most specatacular race of the weekend and Matt and I were ecstatic with the results...o.k. I was a bit more excited because that was win 2 out of 5.
(School'n Pat and Chris on how its done)
Next we went into the cash bash so we couldn't race each other for the rest of the day and decided to finish the match race Saturday morning.
Saturday came early and found us standing in the rain at the track listening to generators. "Screw this, lets go back to the shop and consume large quantities of Sierra Nevada IPA." Which we promptly did. Unfortunately Sunday was also a wash so we packed up our gear and headed for home.
We'll call the match a draw since we didn't get to finish it and we'll start again in the Fall at an undisclosed track near you. Congratulations to the WOS team for meeting our challenge four weeks ago and building a race car in record time. I'm thinking that it may not have happened if they had not blown up their stocker since I noticed some pretty fancy parts borrowed from the Savoy. Either way, they made it happen and we all got to race together. The wet weather didn't even get us down since Friday was so epic and we got to hang with our extended family in Nelson's sister town-ship known as Vashon Isl. A dump truck load of thanks goes out to Chris, Natalie, Joseph, Caroline, Mike, Nola, Matt, Keri, Step, other Matt, Jerry, Mark and everyone else who stopped by and helped out, drank and made us laugh...lots.
Until next time
1 comment:
We need more pics!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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