After deciding to leave a rainy day in Tennessee, we found our way back to North Carolina to race at Shadyside Dragway. Today is their first points race of the season and they have footbrake, pro, Carolina grudge cars, 4.90 index, street racer, and junior dragster classes. Yes, they run a lot of different classes here but the track is always prepped well so the cars run smoothly.
This week we have our two black firebirds on the property ready to roll! The first time run was around 12 pm with overcast skies and a cool breeze. Due to unfortunate delays, such as a pro door car making contact with the wall (driver is okay) and a 4.90 car sideswiping the 60 foot sensor, the dash for cash run was warmer with sunny skies at about 3 pm. Cody and PCM for Less had adjusted the shift points on my Fireturd after the last race and apparently the tune is spot on! The ET only varied .013 between the first two passes even with changing weather conditions and a 3 hour gap. Since I won’t be able to blame any losses today on an inconsistent street car, I’ll need to keep up reaction times like my .004 first pass instead of the .01 red light in dash. 🛑🙆🏼♀️
Cody wins first round with a .003 light and competition single pass. I lost first round with a red light but thank goodness for buybacks because I still have another chance in the race! Second round I cut my opponents reaction time in half and moved on to round number three. Cody also won second round with a major reaction time advantage, but lost third. A pair of .03 reaction times but my car being closer to dial handed me the third round win. Fourth round I had to run a friend of mine and I was lucky he turned on the red light behind me, because another .03 R/T is usually not good enough against Billy Norris!
Round number five brings the race down to only 5 competitors; myself, Robert Hamrick, Ray Crane, Kevin Pace Jr, and a man in a black Falcon who I believe was Randy Blaze. Kevin had the bye run due to the best reaction time of the previous round, so that left Hamrick vs Blaze and Crane vs me. Unfortunately, that’s where my day came to an end as I missed the tree with an .055 light to Crane’s .039 dead 9 run. I was pretty pleased with my finish line driving since I was on a breakout pass I was able to tighten the stripe up to .007, even though it wound up being in vain.🔝🔚🤷🏼♀️ I did see that Blaze won over Hamrick, which left him, Ray Crane and Kevin Pace the final three standing. I’m not exactly sure how runs went down after we left, but I know that Crane ended up winning over Blaze in the finals.
My losing round was about 8:30 pm, so we hurried up to change the Mickey Thompson drag radials back to street tires for the trip home. It was still early enough for dinner at Chick Fil-A which made Cody a lot happier. After fueling up the vehicles and our stomachs 😂we made the trip up the mountain to get home about 11:45 pm, safe and sound.
If you’ve read the other Track Talk post you see that our season hasn’t started off with a big win like we were hoping to, but sometimes this is reality of bracket racing. I promised to be honest on this blog (which if you know me, I’m brutally honest all the time) and that means discussing the days at the track win or lose. Obviously, you’re only going to have one winner of the race so the rest of the field is left a bit short of their goals. The only way to fix that is to continue to show up and try again…and again…and again! That being said, next Saturday we should be Greer bound for another shot! 👍🏻
