hi gang
heres race report from ihra mardi gras nationals at baton rouge,louisiana smax n son aidee set off thurs morn 5 am to meet team member gary mooney (don t ya luv the name) 4 brekky in detroit,michigan and drive to baton rouge in his 2008 dodge ram with a hemi!!!we were heading for the ist ihra meet at state capitol raceway which hasn t seen top fuel for 20 years!!!after driving thru michigan,ohio,kentucky,tennesse and finally mississippi we grabbed a motel at 3 am cream crackered after 22 hrs drivin. we laughed at goin thru counry music capital nashville n blues capital memphis with progressive trance blasting out of window-we looked at huge american flags and felt maybe the american dream was cracking around the edges with all recession hitting but by the time we had left cold canada and arrived in 84 degree sunshine and finally drag racing all this seemed a long way behind us-the place was packed and straight away we beavered on the car as rest of team arrived to get ready fri morn for the ist evening session top fuel guru eddie corr had helped me with clutch settings as we have finally put clutch management on the car to chase down that elusive 4 sec run with the leverich family so me n aidee ripped out cluch and reset all fingers and put clutch timers on etc etc we finally fired up just in time for ist qual but realised brakes needed a bleed but with a scheduled half pass we decided to risk this as pumping brakes seemed fine ist race was against top fuel funnycar champ terry haddock (who dave bryant helps sometimes) who has just gone into a dragster i did huge burnout-bks worked fine backed up-bks worked fine went into pre-stage but bks faded n rolled into stage-i waited for wot seemed an eternity on low side for terry but clutch was starting to drag so i did a kwik pump of the brakes n put top bulb out for deepstage-still no terry so i knew i had to go-didn t think i could get into reverse so i high sided but brakes faded n car rolled away i thought about killing motor but with terry waiting wasn t sure if i needed to be out of the car so i kept on goin was going to hit throttle to blast out of the way but thought brakes may have failed completely or clutch was draggin so decided not to risk crashin n idled down meaning terry had to shut off then cool n refuel he came end of session n ran 4.76 for no 2 so i guess he wasn t that pissed off at me n i went over later to apologise next day for session 2 ,things seemed much better and upbeat i was selected to do a television interview for local station and they said went really well i then did a newspaper interview and car was prepped perfectly i went to line feeling excited n confident with car and burnout and stage went aces i launched with conservative set up only a 1.03 sixty foot and made 212 mph at 1/8th mile in 3.9 secs then blower belt broke n slowed to a 6.20 we dropped 2 cylinders at the hit but no 1 came back in 2 secs but didn t help our qualifying we hadn t restripped the blower n figured our boost is down hence dropped cylinders but with limited time to final session decided to just turn car round n spin blower faster-unfortunately there was a huge crowd so ihra wanted everyone out early so we were gonna miss the call in fact ony 3 of the 12 teams were ready!!!
aidee was a star- he did all clutch himself in record time n was helping the lads with their jobs!
chris karamesines was 1st pair but missed n i was 3rd pair n just missed so we thrashed until 3rd pair ran then they had an oildown-i then saw karamasines towing down so i asked officials if they had decided not to follow running order they didn t seem to know so aidee n team got car to the lanes while i talked to ihra they admitted they screwed up by lettin karamasines run but refused to make a 2nd mistake letting Farndon run (he wasn t ready to race litton before the oildown happened)or a 3rd by letting me run i argued that it should be fair for everyone but the upshot of it all is everyone got to run except us!!!!!!!
had a liquid refreshment to cool down and all the topfuel teams were treated to trays of delicious crayfish partied with a jetbike team n some of the top fuelers and went to motel late came back sunday to watch 1st round action then took off to new orleans to catch back end of mardi gras-ace fun in the 84 degree sunshine -the place was electric we stayed till approx 6 pm then headed back thru alabama and drove non stop (except for 1hr rest) to cincinatti for brekky-finally gettin home at 7pm that nite-phew!!!was over 2000kms each way taking the positive we are in one piece n heading for rockingham north carolina in 6 weeks we will freshen blower n work on our tune up
4 seconds not that far away
stay tuned gang
the boys are thrashing also to get the 35 chev altered finished and put finishing touchs to ronans 69 big block chevelle thanx for all well wishes via email full revs smax :-) heres ihra article - http://www.ihra.com/article/3960.html

heres a vid
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWk9fuom5zw

and some pics
http://www.flickr.com/photos/wleverich/

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