Yellow Bullet Nationals 2012 Race Review And Photos, X275 Drag Radial
X275 Drag Radial Was Tough Going
I skipped the write up about the Super Saturday Swim Meet… I mean Shoot Out at Atco a few weeks back because my wife was right, it was going to rain, and it did. I hated to say that but I did. I should have stayed home and saved for the following week at another track but you have to jump when you have a chance so I did. Trust me you didn’t miss anything but we did get a pass in and got some data. Fast forward to this past weekend if you will please.
Man, what a weekend! If you missed the 3rd Annual Yellow Bullet Nationals at Cecil County you missed one of the great outlaw street car races in a long time. Mar-Schan Motorsports was glad to be part of it and want to thank Monte Mikho and the crew at Cecil County for putting it on.
I am working out of town again so it was a struggle to get home at night after a long day and long commute to get everything locked and loaded so that we could pull out early Friday morning to get to the gates before 8am in anticipation of the crowds that decided to leave the night before. Our trip down through the hills and past the farms of Lancaster County was not without issues though as we lost one of our weight distribution bars from our trailer hitch. The extra tongue weight didn’t make the motor home tow so well but we made it. Now to get back home, that was another thing.
My volunteer crew of one didn’t arrive till later on in the morning but I had the pit and the car ready to go to make as many test hits as we could get in before 5pm and prior to the first round of pro qualifying at 7pm. Four passes and 32 NGK spark plugs later we were making progress and were ready to make a good hard pass with both stages of Induction Solutions nitrous plumbing flowing the laughing gas. Given the warm weather predicted for the weekend we thought it was the time to get aggressive with the tune up to try to qualify as deep as possible.
I was suited up and in the lane with a plan to have an extra 500 horsepower twisting through the ATI Super Glide within 6-tenths of a second after taking the green light. All was well until about 7-tenths of a second when I lost sight of the asphalt and the bleachers and all of humanity and was staring at the expanse of heavens above us. The new Mickey Thompson Drag Radial Pro tires would hook in a car wash apparently and the combination of the track prep, cooler air and loose front suspension had us doing our Cool Bus wheel stander imitation as a trail of sparks came from our parachute mount first, then our steering rack second, as we landed back in the Rising Sun, Maryland zip code. After pulling out of the groove, shutting the BMS/M&M engine down, getting out and assessing the damage, I fired it back up and oil pressure gauge told me that the Lucas Oil was still flowing through our engine. Now the $10,000 question….. Did the photographers catch this on film? If I am going to do something stupid, I want to see it! Turns out we found 3 videos plus some still pictures of our subpar suspension setup but back to the point of photographers getting photos, well the car was well past their view as it came up and passed them in this long and high bumper draggger. Camera guys were sick they had missed it since you really only get one chance and no one expected this wheelie, “EVEN ME!!” but the guys told me the fans loved it!!. Life is good!
Saturday, the air wasn’t as good and we tightened up the front shocks so that our extension was restricted and the tires never missed a beat. We had two more qualifying shots throughout the day and sat on the bump of the 32 car qualifying field at one point only to get bumped out of the field by the end of the night. This x275 Drag Radial class is filled with a bunch of great teams that I am proud to race against and we have our work cut out for us. As it turns out we made it to the first round of eliminations on Sunday as an alternate due to breakage by others on Saturday. We raced all weekend and put the car away with a motor in tact and only some small paint damage on both sides of the car from the wheelie. We lost to the number 3 qualifier who eventually went on to runner up in the finals. Congrats to Shawn Ashe for the R/U and the Bruder Family on yet another win.
We improvised on the way home with our trailer hitch issue and loaded the car backwards to distribute the weight away from the tongue. It wasn’t easy to do but it worked and the car is now back in the garage with some data that we hope will help us in the future. I will be working 13.5 hour days, 7 days a week, starting this week, for the next month at Peach Bottom nuclear plant and living in our motor home away from our family and the car. The next event we plan to make it to will be the Shakedown At E-town in October, pending our crazy work schedule, and plan on picking up where we left off in our progress and putting our best foot forward for our sponsors and our team. Hope to see you there, and unless you are working at a nuclear outage as a foreman in some confined space under a massive turbine with the safety of the community depending upon your success and attention to detail you have no excuse not to be.
