This would be the first time the NSRA Nostalgia Nationals would be run at Santa Pod after the now confirmed closure of Shakespeare County Raceway,, a pox on the money grabbing greedy bastard developers...The team decided that it would be prudent to set up camp Thursday evening so we would be ready for the test and tune on Friday. This was also probably going to be the last nationals that I would race at so I wanted it to be a good one, on top of that it was going to be a bit strange not having number 1 son and crew chief Steve around as he had other Family commitments for the weekend and couldn't make it so we had the company of Mike Oates tuning for us. As usual the motorways were awful so I arrived at the trailer storage park a bit late but it didn't take long to hitch up and get out.
Dave and I arrived early evening and got the car out set up camp ready for the morning. At around 8am the next morning Dave re-appeared and not long after Mike turned up a little bit of fettling on the car and we were ready to go.
We got three runs in on Friday getting quicker each time culminating in a 151.05mph a PB for us but at only 9.3 seconds oh well we wee going in the right direction we managed some serious burnouts that day but were still spinning up on the repair patches just off the 60ft mark.
We called it a day after the three runs. Next morning we went out again this time we ran a 9.2 but a slight improvement on our speed this item we hit 151.59mph another PB. But that was the only run we made on Saturday as the weather Gods turned against as and it poured down so much I reckon I could have paddled over top the bar if I had a boat.
Sunday dawned and the sun came back out we were really looking forward to this day as we had made some changes to the fuel settings and we had hoped to get back deep into the 8 second range, However the car had other ideas and gradually got slower and slower resulting in a 10 second run at only 130 mph, The problem was diagnosed as a worn out distributor cap,
Funny how even the smallest of things can ruin your day. But never mind we had fun we ran a couple of PB.s and on top of everything we were voted the best appearing slingshot and we won a trophy.
So all in all not a bad weekend at all roll on the next round at the "Retro Show" next month.
