I’ve watched most of the live feed yesterday & today, missed a little bit here & there. Thanks for the engine report on the blue Cougar, that’s cool and it’s really flying. A few other neat Fords too, sometimes Freiburger announces the engine combo’s, but not always, and you can’t assume they all actually are Ford powered. I’ve seen a nice looking ‘63 Galaxie there the last couple days too.
Yes, a plethora of oil downs & breakage Monday, although I’ve seen that in past Monday’s too. I follow some of the lead up to these events on Facebook, it’s still the norm that a lot of the people doing these Drag & Drive events are still putting their cars together at the last minute, often without any on the road or dragstrip testing before the event, so some carnage isn’t unexpected. But on the flip side lots of people who are veterans that are really getting their program down too. And the performance of these cars just keeps getting quicker all the time too. And still quite a few participants each year who have never made any dragstrip pass before. I mean that’s a good thing that there are new people getting into both the hobby & the events all the time, of course getting to a dragstrip for some practice before Drag Week would be a help, but it’s likely going to always be the case.
I think maybe the guy doing the engine change Alan is referring to is the guy with the pink Baretta. He seemed pretty excited in posts leading up to Drag Week to be coming to his first Drag Week. He blew up on his first pass on Sunday nights test & tune. He said he had actually made a few passes at the local track before Drag Week, but not enough apparently. I think his original engine was somewhat modified, and he actually drove the car to the event, didn’t trailer it, so Sunday night he was trying to figure out how he was getting home. Most of the other competitors I saw comment encouraged him to find another engine and get it running again. The racers at the track even took up a collection to buy him a Harbor Freight engine hoist. He did find a junkyard engine and I saw a post today where he had it running again. He is definitely out of competition, he wasn’t able to make a pass Monday or today, but he’s going to try and join back up tomorrow, and Hot Rod usually lets those people make passes the rest of the week, they just don’t count, so he won’t be the first. Sometimes in the past those guys win the Spirit of Drag Week award. But yes, we all cross our fingers it doesn’t grenade again.
And yes, I saw the cars that ran the whole way down the track trailing oil, likely also due to being dragstrip novices. Watching the live feed yesterday morning they did have the camera on during the morning drivers meeting, but no audio on, so I don’t know what was said. But maybe in the future they need to reinforce some of those type of things for the people that are new to this. I will say it was probably the shortest Drag Week drivers meetings I’ve seen. Thinking back locally here, many years ago Brainerd International Raceway started their Show & Go event that attracted a lot of people that weren’t regular racers, and after lots of similar first year issues, in later years they got an experienced long time racer to give a class to the novices, it helped a lot.
I saw the guy making the extremely slow pass down the track, and hugging the centerline, second to the last pass yesterday. Today Freiburger commented that upon asking the guy later what was up they found out he had showed up with only street tires, where the rules require drag tires. The guys running the event told him he could run at the end of the day, so as not to effect the prepped track surface, but told him to stay out of the groove and take it easy down the track, it seems he took that very literally lol. It was painful to watch, but humorous now that we know the rest of the story.
I did see some Ford breakage, I think it was the guy with the Falcon sedan delivery that broke the 8” rear end, probably not surprising. They put out a racer in need call and he did find another 8”, although I saw today it seemed like they were looking for another, I hope it didn’t break again.
