Monday 22 September 2014

Close encounters

We really struggled at this weekends national Finals, yes we ran some pretty consistent and fast runs but struggling with tyre shake and wheelspin, and a mixed bag of great 60ft's followed by some of the worst in a long time. We tried something different every run too but it always did the same thing.
We qualified 2nd in the end, out qualified by Allan Davies who ran a 7.604 to our 7.608, so we knew it was going to be close. Race day we woke up to sunshine and a good forecast for the day, this meant we might actually finish an event for a change. In the first round i faced Tony Clark, and in the past Tony has a history of beating me in eliminations, but not this time, he did have a good run however - back into the 7's with a 7.91, and so ended a troubled weekend on a positive note.
In the semi final it was a race against Paul Hambridge, who has run into the 7's before, and he improved on his qualifying times making a 8.06 run against my winning 7.64.
Into the final then, and it was shaping up to be a close race, we had both run a string of 7.6's over the weekend and the outcome was anybodys guess. Before the race we took a gamble to increase the tyre pressure, something we had been delaying trying as we just wanted to go through rounds, but this was the end of the line, and we had nothing to lose so we upped the pressure by nearly a whole psi. Now that may not seem like a lot, but in drag racing changes are usually made in quarter or half psi increments the tyres have so little air in them anyway.
The result was a releif, we didn't win but we did have a really close race, and importantly hardly any of the tyre shake, wheelspin and bouncing. It just went nice and straight and we were side by side the whole length of the track, i was slightly ahead till three quarter track but Allan had 2mph on me and krept past to take the win by .009 seconds. Allan ran a personal best time and i ran a personal best mph. A great Race.
1st slow mo clip shows the tyre shake we were struggling with.

And the 2nd it's much better, just a small amount of spin but the tyre doesn't unload badly.

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