Sunday, August 22, 2004

NHRA Sport Compact

King of all LAME events! I've been to Tuesday Night Test & Tunes that were better attended than this. All of the big Mopars were either already knocked out or broke.

Scott Mohler broke a lot, spewing parts and fluid all over the track. Then they left him parked and bleeding just past the towers for a long time. He's gonna lose lots of series points on that. We didn't hear exactly what happened, but the announcer said it was the motor. We were thinking transmission, since they'd just replaced it on Saturday. I guess they had a snap ring problem... Hehe!

Shaun Carlson didn't get out of the lights because of some transmission trouble. The announcer thought it was just an autostart problem, but we found out later that he couldn't get the car into any gear lower than 4th at the line, so there was no way for him to bump forward into the second staging light.

The highlight of the day -by a long long long shot- was Shaun Carlson signing a Neon Hotwheel for Chris. He put his 7.73 @ 193 time on it. It was really cool. We're probably three of twelve people that even bothered to walk through the pits, and I'm sure we were three of seven people who even knew who they were.

Tim Kish had his gorgeous R/T down for the event. We watched him get knocked out of brackets running a mid-high 14 second pass. His wife and child were there too. Last time I saw Tim, he had just gotten engaged. I didn't even suspect they'd had a child too. I just don't keep up with people anymore.

I definately should have raced. There were only a handful of cars in the Tech classes, and a good percentage of them had absolutely no clue what they were doing. I could have cleaned up easily. It was a bad day for Neons on the track, so maybe it's a good thing I didn't. I think Dennis's slower car could have cleaned up. Did I mention that this event was LAME?

I should have entered the Dyno Challenge too. The "winner" in N/A 4 cylinder only put down 151. I have a sneaking suspicion that I'd have given him at least a good run for his money on that number. Yeah. It's a sad day when I attend an event that I actually think I could win. That is NOT a good comment on the state of things.

The car show had maybe 25 cars entered. There was nothing horribly disgusting, nothing that really got my attention. I missed the bikini contest... Sheesh, if it was as good as the rest of the event, I'm pretty glad about that!

We saw a real Skyline. Chris thought the right-hand drive was pretty cool. He even tried to get giant pretzel salt on it!

The event would not have been so lame if it would have been better attended. More competitors in every class would have made the long breaks between "big races" more fun. A lot of the bike racers were missing because of the AMA event in Indy the same weekend. A lot of "famous" sport-compact people were there, but it didn't seem important or interesting. NHRA shouldn't have sat on their ass for so long with sport-compact. Our friend Allix said that NOPI was a lot better. What a shame. I wish that we could get attendance for the more "race oriented" events. But it is hard to compete with foam parties... Sheesh.

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