The last of the Premier Street Car Association races took place this month in Fontana, CA, and it was one hell of a final race. We went into the last race of the year solidly in the 3rd spot in points. We were 4 rounds out of first place, and only 2 rounds out of the number 2 spot. We had just come off a final round appearance in the previous points race, and we were feeling quite confident in how the car would run. Much to our disappointment however, the first pass down the track during Friday’s testing, the transmission started leaking quite a lot of fluid. Because of the design of our factory transmission, whatever was broken inside was not fixable by Sunday’s eliminations. So we ended up borrowing a Volkswagen Jetta for the remainder of the weekend. Why VW you ask? Well, in addition to racing the normal PSCA classes at this weekend’s event, Fontana was also hosting the Powderpuff racing series, which is an all female and all VW class. Thanks to a suggestion from Mel Roth, we decided that it would be beneficial for us to race a VW because it allowed us to have an extra round of time trial and eliminations to help better dial the car for our points classes.
All day Saturday I spent my time runs trying different staging and launching strategies to get the best reaction time and the most consistent elapsed time. My experience in the Magnum a couple years ago came in very handy this past weekend, because I had to remember how to launch a car with a near 3 second 60 foot time. For those of you who aren’t exactly drag race junkies, that’s very VERY slow. I was definitely one of the slowest cars in competition that weekend, but at the end of Saturday, I felt like I had a good handle on how to drive the car. And it worked out pretty well! I ended up seeing 5 win lights on my side of the track on Sunday. And I went to the third round in the Bracket-1 class, after being beat by a good friend of mine in the car that I used to drive. Dick Krieger, in his 23 Altered T, was great on the tree and had a more consistent car than I did. He did a great job and deserved to get to the final round. And now I can say that I lost to the champion, since he took home the 2015 Bracket-1 championship.
We will know more this week about what exactly went wrong with the car, but overall it was a good weekend. I didn’t expect to go 5 rounds in a street car, let alone one that ran in the mid 16 seconds in the quarter mile. Never a dull moment in drag racing. Next race is the awesome Street Car Super Nationals in Las Vegas November 18-22!
