THE JOY OF NITRO

Sometimes in life you don’t want to pinch yourself, in case what’s happening is, in fact, just a dream! I have been lucky enough to have a few of those moments — running my first six-second pass and winning my first New Zealand championship were certainly two of them — but no time more so than right now: getting to drive for Graeme and Wendy Cowin in the Aeroflow Outlaw Nitro Funny Cars (AONFC) series. For our third event in the series, we headed to Willowbank Raceway in Queensland. Now, I had raced at Willowbank before. The only difference? I was about 13 years old then, and it was the 1999 Junior Dragster titles. I’m not too sure there is much I can connect between the two events, but one thing was exactly the same this time around — when we rolled ‘One Bad Kiwi’ out of the transporter, I was about as excited and giddy as I was when I was 13 — especially as the boys from Cowin Family Racing had put one of the new-style injector hats on the car. That, in my — completely unbiased — opinion, made the car look even cooler than it did before. After running 5.76s at Perth Motorplex, we were confident of getting back to that number come the end of the night. Our only disadvantage in relation to the other cars competing at Willowbank was that we had not run our combo at this track before, so we had no data to go off for the first round. One thing that’s crazy yet kind of cool about Willowbank is that the last part of the track and the braking area are downhill; it wasn’t until I stood at the start line and realized I couldn’t actually see the finish line cones that I realized this downhill could be rather daunting. In fact, some of the guys reckoned that on your first pass it’s like driving off a cliff, but I am pretty sure they were just teasing me. As at all previous AONFC events, we had the salute to the crowd before racing began. To be perfectly honest with you, it’s still just absolutely nuts, sitting among all of those nitro funny cars, which are cackling away. First run, and we had the bad luck in the random draw of picking the quickest, fastest, and most successful car in the history of AONFC — Rick Gauci in ‘Nitro Express’. In terms of first-round match-ups, that’s the one car you want to avoid — but, at the same time, I was actually going to race against the Nitro Express with Graeme Cowin turning the screws! This time last year, that was something we could have only dreamed of. It was always going to be a tough task, though, and, when One Bad Kiwi rattled the tyres 200 feet out, I had no choice but to pedal it and watch as