I had stayed at the track overnight, so the task early Monday morning was to load everything I had brought with into the Mark VIII and move the car to a regular pit spot away from the Van & trailer which were in the trailer impound area. Monday morning starts off with a drivers meeting where they go over the rules & procedures and introduce the Hot Rod crew.Here's a picture from the drivers meeting.
By the way here's a picture from overhead on registration day, yes that's the line of cars waiting to get into the tech lines circling the pits.
After the drivers meeting I unloaded my car and went up to the stands to watch while I waited for my class to get called.
This is truly an international event, lots of fans and participants flying their national flag.
The usual schedule is to run a couple hours of the "class" cars, where Alan, Doug, Jack & Scott were running, then to run an hour or so of the Street Machine Eliminator cars, where Jared, Jim & I were running, and also Hemi Joel this year. The third session of the day is an "all run" group until they finally close the lanes. Monday usually runs a little later at the track to make up for the late start due to the drivers meeting. I had made my run and went back up to the stands to watch Joel's final pass.
I had turned in my time slip and received the route sheet for the drive, I then went back to the pits to see what Joel had decided and found out they were going to throw in the towel due to the clutch issues. The drives this year were pretty tame and relativity short compared to some previous years. Tonight's run had a fair amount of easy highway miles, but I saw at least 10 groups of cars that had pulled over along the way, probably checking out initial highway drive issues. The first checkpoint after about 60 miles was an old drive-in movie theater.
Then about a 90 mile run to a vacant grocery store. David Freiburger from Hot Rod was also running the route and stopped at the checkpoint at about the same time and chatted. The final leg towards Gateway was quite a bit of interstate driving for a total of 267 miles.
