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"The Beast"
 | October, 2009 - I found out in August that I qualified to participate in the NHRA ET Divisionals, being held at Firebird International Raceway in Phoenix. We went up to Phoenix on Thursday, Oct.1st for the TnT, 2 runs, and we got one more run on Friday and one on Saturday, which was supposed to be the day we began elimination runs but didn't. Sunday, we had one test run on Sunday before the first round of eliminations. Choosing your dial in was pretty difficult, as the runs were far apart and it was cool and humid in the morning, hot and drier in the afternoon. I won my first round, sheer luck with choosing my dial more correctly than my opponent. I lost the second round, by .004 and wasn't sure which of us won until I saw his win light come on. It was fun and I hope I'm able to go again! |
| August, 2009 - The car has been running very well, though I've been having problems getting it to run in the mid-12s since the clutch was replaced. A very large slam on the bottom of the car proved to be the rear spring mounts snapping. We took the car to Leon's Exhaust for the chassis mods and taking his recommendation, replace he old traction bars with ladder bars and frame stiffeners. The few times I've run it since it's been bogging off the line, so I've raised the tire pressure and it's still bogging. I think I may need to change my launch RPMs to 5500 to overcome this. |
| September, 2008 - This is the first time I have EVER had to say this but I finally broke the '69 Mustang. I had made 3 practice runs, at the last R1320 race of the year, the first was a really good run, even though the effective altitude was about 6600'. The next two runs, I had trouble hitting 4th gear, though the 3rd run was pretty darn good even missing 4th gear, I still wanted to make one more run, under the assumption that missing 4th was driver error, not the car. On run number 4, I had a difficultly getting the shifter into 2nd, which is the gear I do my burnouts in. I finally did, and the burnout was fine, but when I released the line lock button to pull out of the burnout I heard something. I couldn't put my finger on the sound but I pushed in the clutch and put it shifter in 1st, let out the clutch to pull up to the lights and......nothing....I tried again, pulling it out of gear and put it back in, still nothing. I tried reverse, and 2nd.....nothing....clutch is gone is our guess, as after we pushed it off the track the smell of clutch about knocked us over. No worries though, team races are done for the year and even though I'd like to race it in the "Quartermile for a Cure" on November 1st, if I can't I race the little Mustang (the '05). |
| November, 2007 we changed out the tranny for a wide ratio, which significantly improved my 60' time once I mastered the new shift point. But before that happened we had a horrible bog off the line. The new harder launches were causing the gas the in carburetor to slosh away from the pick ups and the car was running out of gas. Patrick remedied the bog by putting extenders on the jets. Then he decided he wanted to change out the front shocks to Lakewood 90\10s. With these 3 simple changes, tranny, jet extensions, and shocks, the new fastest run is 12.46 @ 108 mph. |
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