ADRL’s Drag Stock Leaves Its Mark !!
By Camp Stanley: Post Date: 9/4/2010, Photos Courtesy Of Van Abernathy
“Sucks to be us.” was my blunt assessment to Competition Plus.com on being outside the 16-car field after three Pro Extreme qualifying sessions for the ADRL’s prestigious Dragstock VII on Friday at Rockingham Dragway.
We don’t very often blow our stuff up and almost never, ever knock the blower off of it, but we did a good job of all of it in one go yesterday in that second qualifying session. We lost two cylinders on the run, one of them at 1.6 seconds in and the other 1.8 seconds later. Then we managed to blow the blower off it at 3.03 in! And John still put up a 3.93 lap at only 163.51 mph.
We got back, checked the damage and got right into fixing the blower issues. That being completed we were checking the driver’s side valve lash and found out that an intake valve seat had fallen out. Then we knew why the blower left the manifold! This was where the carnage started. So, we fixed that by putting on one of our spare heads, and then it was on to the other side for a valve adjustment. There we found that a head had fallen off a valve on that side. So we changed that head with our last spare piece!
Then when we went out for the night qualifier in the great air I got way to aggressive inside the bellhousing! When John swapped feet the Camaro went about 15 feet and rattled itself almost all the way to the next county! So there we were qualified at # 19 in the ADRL’s most prestigious race. BUT never, ever sell us short! Never, ever consider us dead and buried!
When Saturday’s lone qualifying session came around we were ready to go with a borrowed blower belt from those great ADRL sponsors, LenMar Motorsports! The racing surface appeared to be in top notch shape even though the clouds were in abundance. The first cars put up some great numbers which gave us confidence that our last second shot would be a good one yet again! BUT then of course it had to rain! And then it stopped, the track was dry and we were the second pair after the aforementioned LenMar 57 Chevy. And Gaylen did for me exactly what I asked him to PLEASE do! He gave me a set of 3.67 tracks for John to run right down the race track in!
At the flash of green John was off and gone beside Alex Hossler until Alex turned the paint brown on the side our car when he went by in the traps! But it was all good, because as a team we had succeeded yet again by breaking into a field at the last possible chance, we hope. Now all that is left is to go to Norwalk in two weeks and see that none of the 8-10 cars left to make qualifying attempts do just that. As long as our hard work and perseverance pay off and we are in the field, it’s GAME ON from there!!!
