A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE DRAGS

based fire retardant. One of these is mounted on each side of the chassis, and steel tubes clipped to the chassis direct the foam from the bottles to three nozzles — one mounted on the top of the steering column, aimed directly at the driver, and one on each side of the engine, mounted on the top chassis rail and pointing at 45 degrees up towards the engine block and cylinder heads. An air cylinder, also mounted to the chassis, provides the actuation to set off the bottles via a pair of buttons, one of which is mounted on each side of the chassis, where it is readily accessed by the driver in his normal driving position. The system can be quickly deployed by the driver by a quick push of the two buttons if an engine explosion happens and fire results, and — as has occurred countless times over the decades — the driver will be saved from serious burns or even death by the foam being directed at him, while the nozzles facing the engine will extinguish the fire. Unless the car is about to race, the system is ‘disarmed’: pins are slipped through the fire bottles to stop them working, and the air bottle is turned off. It is the crew’s responsibility, just prior to a run, to remove the pins and turn on the air bottle. After the race, the pins are re-inserted and the air bottle is turned off so that the system can’t be unintentionally deployed. You can see where this is going, right? Back to where we were, outside the Woodend burger bar at one in the morning: our attractive jeans-clad drag racing fan was shuffling herself down and back into the confines of the roll cage, steadying herself with the upper chassis rails as she lowered herself down towards the seat. That’s about when this great idea to let the pretty girl sit in the race car suddenly turned into a real dumb idea. Just before she got into position in the seat — still being assisted by our three drunk drag racers and by now being watched by a gathering of late-night partygoers — her elbows slid back along the chassis rails and simultaneously hit the two fire bottle buttons, setting off the full force of the funny car’s fire system. Within milliseconds, both she and the funny car were swamped in about 10 kilograms of fire-retardant foam. It blasted her and everything around her and behind her at great pressure, soaking her from head to toe in cold, wet foam, while the two engine nozzles drowned the engine, chassis rails, the underside of the body, and generally made a complete friggin’ mess of the kind that only someone who has had to clean up a race car after the fire bottles have gone off can comprehend. Clearly, someone had forgotten to insert the safety pins and turn the air bottle off! Whoops! As Miss Woodend hurriedly wriggled out of the car’s confines, staggered away from the car in a state of shock and disgust, and disappeared off into the night, all Grahame and Co. could do was to stare at the devastation before them and contemplate that this almighty mess would have to be cleaned up before the car owner arrived later on that very morning — then, of course, there was the small matter of having an empty fire system in a nitro-burning funny car … As they say, however, all’s well that ends well. The lads never heard from the jeans-clad girl from Woodend. They got to Christchurch by 2am, and, so that the owner wouldn’t find out what had happened, they worked through the remaining hours until mid-morning to get the car cleaned up before he flew into Christchurch for racing that day. Luckily for the owner — who was also the driver — the car didn’t catch fire over the weekend, so he also never had to find out that his fire bottles were dead empty during his 200-plusmiles-per-hour passes!