My hotel was in Collinsville Illinois, so it was a short interstate drive to the track that morning. A few participants were taking advantage of the hotel parking lot to do a little tuning and maintenance, here's Tom Bailey's Unlimited ride along with one of our fellow Ford guys.
Arriving at the track there was a line of Dragweek folks.
Forum member Jared and I were pitted next to each other and had a chance to chat. I was able to catch a little action and take some pictures before my class was called too. Here's Street Machine Eliminator assembled in the staging lanes.
I got a video of my run on the cell phone today. Here's the link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0X6GKMblEjUA couple of notable happenings from Tuesday: one of the Dragweek participants forgot to latch his T-Tops before his run and had one blow off during the run, resulting in a short track cleanup for glass removal. A couple of the local spectators knew where there was a salvage yard with a replacement T-Top and went and got it. I'm constantly amazed at the Dragweek stories of locals who can seem to be able to source almost any needed item. Someone captured a picture of the T-Top taking flight.
After Day 1 Tom Bailey had a slight 6.51 to 6.57 lead over Dave Schroeder for quickest ET, but that ended on Day 2 when Bailey tossed a rod and wounded the crank and had to withdraw. Here's the carnage.
That put Dave Schroeder in the lead.
Dennis Taylor brought out a new Gasser entry this year, and was trying to get a handle on it early in the week. At Gateway he went into a giant wheelstand right onto the bumper and let off abruptly. When it came down hard it ended up blowing both front tires and damaging the front wheels. He stopped on the track and the track crew used the roll jacks under the tires to push it back towards the starting line. Literally before they were able to get the car pushed back, another Dragweek participant had brought Dennis up a pair of front wheels to borrow. I'm not sure why, but Dennis Taylor withdrew from competition, but did finish out the week making exhibition passes. In one of those "If only I'd have been thinking" moments, I did grab a picture of his run because I thought he'd pull a good wheelie, but wasn't using my phone camera in motor drive mode and missed catching all of his wheel stand. Here it was still going up.
A little hard to see, but here it is on the right hand side of the picture going skyward.
A couple more pictures of action at the track.
The Aussie Chevelle even has it's own T-Shirts.
I thought this was kind of a humorous shot of Jarrad Scott working on his Hemi powered '62 Ranchero gasser. I posted it to the Dragweekers Facebook page and asked for people to caption the photo, quite a few responses I can't repeat here lol.
The route sheet to Byron Dragway was mostly all interstate driving this trip for a total of 285 miles. Pretty unusual, but pretty easy for me this year. I did think about what a tedious trip it would have been had I been doing it in my '67 Shelby with the 4.56 gears like in 2015. Our only checkpoint was Carl's Ice cream factory in Normal Illinois at the 158 mile point. The ice cream store was a big hit with everyone, and many made it their dinner stop. I will commend the place too for seeming to be able to keep up with the increased business without too much of a wait. Here's a picture. It has been pointed out to me that Carl the Ice Cream guy looks suspiciously like the Muffler Man from that chain.
As was pointed out a couple times on the live feed during the week, these people didn't buy this car until they knew they were registered for Dragweek.
The rest of the drive to my hotel for the night in Rochelle went well.
