Wayne Keys and Mike Evans. Caramel slice, good friends and RAIN

By Camp Stanley
Photos By Grant Stephens dragnews.com.au

Hagerstown, MD – The Nitro Champs at the stunning Sydney Dragway is the race to attend if you enjoy Australian drag racing. This is the next to the last round for the warriors of the quarter mile that reside all the way round the bottom side of the Earth as we know it. But it is also a race to attend if you are plying your wares in that very same drag racing industry.

And I got to attend at the request of two teams who I have been assisting for awhile. Over the course of time we have become very good friends, these entire teams and I. Those of you who follow the trials and tribulations of my world travels via this website will recognize the names of Wayne Keys from Perth and Mike Evans from Tasmania. I was off once again to see how well we could do against the best the country had to offer.

We did not have the good luck with the The Keys Family Racing Commodore as we did in Perth. The rains came both times we were in the lanes for qualifying and the track got cold which is something that this race car does not like at all. But the first round of eliminations brought a well deserved win and great incrementals on Wayne’s shutoff, save the index run. But the next round was not so kind to them.

Their competitor hung him out to dry on the starting line and that little exercise welded the clutch together and that as we say, ended that. The Australian drag racing fraternity has a TWENTY second stage rule and some racers really abuse this. But as I told Wayne and Mike after the same thing happened to both cars, we have a fix for that for next year’s season. Then those racers with no class will be able to sit back for two days if they wish.

The Mike Evans team had come across the seas from Tasmania to race at Sydney Dragway so we could get a baseline on his newly fitted pedal clutch and get Mike some laps on driving the car with this new piece in preparation for the new season when he fits his newly acquired Brad Anderson hemi. Mike’s car did not give him much better ETs than he recorded last year but in between the raindrops it did give him very consistent runs. But he was as done as a Christmas turkey on his first round of eliminations run in the left lane of a very cold race track. He wisely clicked it off at half track when he realized it was spinning the tires and moving around way to much to be safe.

The best thing about racing with the team from Tasmania is his bride of many years’ desert named caramel slice. I first sampled this last year and became instantly addicted. It is not something a slightly overweight ole guy should really be eating but that along with Sunday morning pancakes cooked up in the trailer covered in jellied fruit is nothing that a man can very easily turn down. And Mike doesn’t help when he makes 200 comments a day about where the caramel slice is stashed. AND I am not even going to mention the other desert stashed away in that very same refrigerator! All things being equal we are pretty sure we have a plan in place to help improve both race cars for the new season. The drivers are on their games, the crews are on their games and the drive trains are performing as they should. It is now the Commodore’s chassis of the Keys Family Racing team that needs attention. And an off season weight savings campaign will also help improve the effort. An eighty pound heavy race car does not help the efforts in racing.

The infamous caramel slice…

When there is a drag race in Sydney you can count on rain.

And as I stated previously the fitting of the new Brad 6 power plant in the Evans’ race car and the already sourced Kobelco blower and carbon fiber injector should enable them to step up into AA/AP from SCO. The SCO class is the class that evolved for the supercharged cars who could either not be competitive or had no desire to compete at the level required in class racing. It is a really great class for diversity as they race in a Dial Your Own format. The only requirement to enter this class is your power plant must supercharged, hence the Supercharged Outlaws moniker! Door cars, funny cars, dragsters, altered, they all come out to play as one!