I was reading one of Andy Fadsters posts regarding safety and Paul Satchels concerns a couple of days back and then yesterday I received a mail from Claire our wonderful Wild Bunch boss, forwarding the same concerns from SCR and Paul. I am surprised this hasn't been bought up a lot earlier, like years ago. RWYB was initially for guys who could bring their slightly hotted up street cars onto the strip and see what they could do, Today however we have out and out race cars running in this category capable of running very fast times and speeds.
My take on safety has always been.."what about the guy running next to me or the spectators or even the marshals?" I am not the worlds greatest advocate of the SFI system as all I see is it's a way for a lot of manufacturer's to make money out of us and god knows most of us don't have enough of that! In the States they run every weekend for a lot of the year whereas over here for instance I only managed 4 meetings last year and probably will only get to five at the most this year so my safety stuff wont wear out at the same rate as our American cousins gear. I have metal shields on my gearbox how are they supposed to wear out??? they can't unless they get rusty and corrode yet I have to pay to have them re-certified every so many years, a ridicules situation which ever way you look at it Every 5 years I have to throw out a perfectly good set of harness's ..pure stupidity But! that never stopped me from having safety equipment and to make sure it is kept in good nick, its just common sense folks, most of the cars running in The Wild Bunch and Supercharged Outlaws and even the Outlaw Anglia's are capable of tremendous speeds, remember motorists get killed in 50 mph shunts every other day???? Even though I do resent having to pay for SFI'd safety equipment I still do it and as such my car is up to date on SFI tags and the after having a new roll cage fitted I had my car re-tagged this was not just because I wanted to attend the odd msa event but I did it for my own peace of mind, as I sit here I am trying to locate a new diaper for my car as I ripped the original one open when the car bounced at Shaky the other week, I don't have to have one for my class of car but...its safety. So yes I agree there should be a minimum safety standard with regards restraints and shields and clothing even in RWYB classes. Right that's enough of that for now.
Back to our ill fated meeting at Shaky the spring shootout Our new friend and Steve's pal Justin took some photo's and a couple of videos for the team, I have just received the latest and this is the one where it really went wrong for us.
Back to our ill fated meeting at Shaky the spring shootout Our new friend and Steve's pal Justin took some photo's and a couple of videos for the team, I have just received the latest and this is the one where it really went wrong for us.
We couldn't run after the amazing burnout as I couldn't hold her on the brake we reset the tickover but..damage was done.
The team have been busy, Steve has had the heads welded and has ordered a couple of gaskets, but you learn as you go along in the sport, first of all Steve has been told it would be a good idea to make sure the ports on the intake manifold match those on the heads when the two are back together, there is a good chance they don't match and depending how far out they are this could cause fuelling issues, they may require a wee bit of machining the heads that is or maybe the inlet manifold.
The other thing Steve has to look at is the nozzle sizes Steve has spoken to another friend of ours Mike Oates who also runs a SBC injected slingshot who has calculated that we need bigger nozzles on our motor so something else to look into to try and stop the damage to the motor. We are taking our time and will try and make Dragstalgia if at all possible but nothing is going to rush us as we don't wont to have to go through this again.
Something I forgot to put on the last post, most of us know that Shaky's days are numbered so as a kind of memorial that we hope will be saved, the signing on office has become one big autograph book where all the teams are being asked to sign the walls.
So of course I obliged for the team, gonna miss this place when it's gone, anyway back tot he plot there are still lots of things to do before July if at all possible we want to try and make at least one RWYB to test before Dragstalgia.
