April 8th - ID Drag Wars at Texas Motorplex.

It was a great day. Had a few scary moments but came away with a new fastest time and the 2nd place trophy.

 Here are the results (I am car 883):

First Time Trial - 15.632, not too bad but didn't feel real solid.

Second Time Trial - 15.871, something wasn't right. Went back to the pits and checked the plugs. As it turns out I was racing on only 3 cylinders. Check out the pic.

Third Time Trial (after replacing the dead plug) - 15.302, much better. New fastest ET for me (for the moment).

First Round Eliminations - 15.309 on a 15.20 dial. Clutch slipping just a little.

Second Round Eliminations - 15.251 on a 15.25 dial. New best time. Car was perfect. I had to nail the brakes about the 1000 ft. line to prevent from braking out (as my trap speed can show). I did a search on DragTimes.com to see what other cars that had my 1/8th mile time did in the 1/4 mile. I was surprised to find out all of them were running mid to high 14's. Everyone in the 15's had 10.0 1/8th mile times.

Third Round Eliminations - 16.051. Bad news. As I was getting into it in 2nd I sprayed just a little below 3,000 RPM and I think due to the MSD's multiple spark per stroke under 3,000 RPM that first spark must have ignited the mixture before the intake valve was closed. Anyway I had 2 MAJOR backfires in the engine. I let off and got back on it above 3,000 RPM and ended up winning.

Since it was now getting close we didn't have a chance to go to the pits for repairs. I did pop my hood and saw that the intake had been blown off the throttle body and the air filter had ballooned out a little bit. I tried to push it back on but was told to start staging for the next round.

Fourth Round Eliminations - 15.616. Intake was still off the throttle body so I'm sure some NOS was escaping into the engine bay. Again no time for repairs.

Quarter Finals - 16.028. Some was the intake, some was me still a bit shaken and not sure if the car was damaged or not, and some from not getting a chance to cool the car down.

Semi-Finals - Got a bye run so just took a Sunday drive at 21.166 and advanced to the finals

Thankfully there was a bit of time while the other classes were going through their finals and some of the members of SERG grabed my tools and brought them back to the staging lanes. I got the intake back on the throttle body but didn't have time for any other checks.

Finals - 15.587. With all the confusion I didn't get a chance to think about bumping up my dial in. I got eliminated but, after factoring in the reaction time, not by much.

The following Monday I took off the intake and checked the spark plugs and there was no visible damage.