Hopefully Jay and the rest of the forum will forgive the non-FE powered exploits of the Trunk Monkey extrodinaire (HemiJoel) and the Trunk Monkey in training (Thatdarncat). But with Jay out I'll try to provide some coverage. For those that don't get the Trunk Monkey reference you'll have to go back and read some of Jay's Dragweek stories from previous years. Joel may fill in some gaps along the way. Dragweek has a driver & crew meeting in the morning Monday going over some of the rules and we attended that. They then started running the "class" cars, such as Unlimited, Modified, Gasser etc. After a couple hours of those participants making passes they had a session of Daily Driver, the class Joel is entered in. Joel made what he felt was a decent pass at 14.06 and decided to stick with 1 run. There is another "all run" session after that before they close the track but we loaded up the car and hit the road early. That turned out to be a good decision. Not long after our second checkpoint in Chelsea, OK. a couple hours into the drive, Joel found he couldn't shift down from 5th gear. He found a place to pull off the road, jacked up the car ( jackstand utilized ) and found the 3-4 shift rod had broken in half. The thought was Magilla Gorilla probably cracked it during the track pass, finishing it off on the road. About the time he got the rod off the trans another Dragweek participant stopped to see if we needed help. He gave Joel a ride back to town where he found a shop to weld the rod. They just did a butt weld, which was good enough to get us back on the road, but Joel felt it needed some re-inforcement. After we were underway Joel called a friend of his, Steve who lives on the way to Topeka and he lined us up with a friend of his, Ralph, who is a retired welder. Joel took the rod off again at Steve's house and we brought it to Ralph who added some gussets and tig welded it. Joel got it back on the car and we finally got to bed around midnight. Of course there was bench racing involved too, but that was a welcome diversion at least. Here's a couple photos of Joel at work and the repaired part.
It's been interesting to see the people that turn out to watch as the Dragweek cars roll through their towns. Since Hot Rod doesn't give us the route we need to take until we are leaving the track I'm not sure how they fiqure out we're coming, but it's a cool part of the experience. I'm a little behind on providing these updates, I haven't had wi-fi for a couple days, but I'll do the best I can and have more for tomorrow.
