ADRL Topeka And The Yellow Brick Road
By Camp Stanley
Hagerstown, MD – What else can we say about Topeka except that we should have stayed home like we threatened to do a few updates ago. Between the bad (REALLY ROTTEN, ROTTEN) luck and the weather, Topeka was nothing short of a disaster for us. We 
started the trip off with a stopover at National Trail Raceway in Columbus, Ohio and Friday night and Saturday morning should have told us something! Massive thunderboomers Friday night and Saturday morning cancelled the racing and our testing on Saturday.
But Sunday dawned a beautiful day and the National Trail Raceway track personnel gave us a track that was as good as they get. We left there, me on to Topeka and John, Scottie and Jimmy back home with a plan to change motors in Topeka since we decided that the experimental cam installed in the motor over the winter was a major culprit in our lack of performance.
I met up with Andreas Howald, better known as Andy who is one of the crew on Marcus Hilt’s Swiss Pro Mod in Topeka and put him right to work I did! Andy and I removed the primary engine from the Camaro and put the spare from under the bench between the chassis rails. We got it done with a lot of help from help from our friend, Mr “I only have duallie” John DeCerbo and one of his crew guys. And when John Stanley and crew arrived we finished it up and were ready to have at it! So we thought…
Our first run netted us a very conservative 4.01 with lots and lots of fuel and no timing for the 4200 feet of density altitude. Happy with that we were for a start and after hopping it up a bit we went out for the second qualifier. John said the car felt the best it had since we went to the converter.
All was well and good till 2.1 seconds in and the head fell off an intake valve, went back up through the port, across the manifold and into number five intake port where it wrecked that valve as well. John killed everything at 2.5 and the Appalachia on Steroids Camaro still mustered a 2.61 and a 4.06 with the blower hanging off it! The third round we were shut down with an oil leak and that ended our day.
Saturday morning started bright and early at 5AM with high winds and rain wreaking havoc in our pit area along with lots of others. When we finally got the car put away and the awning down and out of the wind our pit area looked as if a bomb had gone off in it! And again more of our many fellow racers helped us out. As the winds and rain died down and we were standing back and surveying what had just happened I swore that I saw the Cowardly Lion, the Tin Man, Toto and some little girl running helter-skelter amongst the trailers!
Our fourth and last qualifier yielded us nothing more than another what appeared to be a burnout about 20 feet out when the Camaro blazed the tires from TO MUCH power! To little, to late and that AGAIN ended that!
So now we are back in Appalachia deciding on our next plan of attack and staring real hard at an almost empty checkbook! A lot of teams may say they don’t care about that $1500 to qualify check but let me tell you one and all, that figure is built into our travel budget way before the season even begins.
In 2011 we have already had THREE non qualifying outings and that has taken a cool $4500 out of our travel budget. And we have now already equaled the TOTAL amount of DNQs since we came over to the ADRL!
Hmmmmmmm, what to do, what to do??? That sure is starting to sound familiar!
