AEROFLOW RACE DIARY

As I write this, I have just got home from another Aeroflow Outlaw Nitro Funny Cars event. This one was at Willowbank Raceway in Brisbane. I’ll tell you what, I’m absolutely zonked and just about ready to fall asleep on the couch, but I wanted to write this column while everything is fresh in my mind. I have talked before about the ups and downs and the roller coaster that is my job on race day, and the Willowbank event was certainly no different. I’m sure everyone wants to know about the racing, so we will get straight to that. For this event, once again, I had three cars to tune and oversee. The first was ‘King Kong’, to be driven by Jake Donnelly at this event. We didn’t really have a tune-up for this car, so it was always going to be an event where we worked hard trying to improve the car’s performance. I had run a 5.80 in Kong for the one pass that I did in testing, but otherwise we didn’t really have much to work off. Then I had my two usual cars, ‘Bandit’ and ‘One Bad Kiwi’. I was pretty confident that we could really contest for the podium’s top step with one of these cars.

Due to the three-round format we run, the first two rounds are a completely random draw. Previous speeds or event results don’t mean anything when it comes to who you get to race for the first two rounds. And, for One Bad Kiwi, we got about the worst draw possible. First up, we had Dan Donnelly in the ‘Avenger’. Dan had a quick car at the last event, and they ran an even quicker car in testing, so I knew that we had to be on our game. Knowing Dan could run a mid to low 5.50, we set the Kiwi up to run what I thought should be around that number. On the flash of the green, I stood on the throttle and the Kiwi went up almost instantly in aggressive tyre smoke. I quickly tried to pedal it, and it went up in smoke again, so I let the car settle right down, stood on it, and off it went — and I mean it started flying. By this stage, the Avenger was well and truly gone and ended up running a 5.53, which was a good run. What was annoying was that I already had over a 10th of a second on the start line, so I only had to run a 5.64 or better to win the round. I was frustrated when I got out at the other end of the track, because it made no sense for the Kiwi to smoke the tyres like that. The problem, however, soon became clear: a malfunction with the wheelie bar meant that the car had hit the bar so hard that it had bounced the rear end off the ground, causing it to spin the tyres. For the second round, our draw got even tougher. Once again, we had to race the winningest car in the series — the fastest car from round one tuned by one of the best nitro tuners in the world: the ‘Nitro Express’. I had never beaten the black ’57 Chev before, and it had brought us plenty of ‘bridesmaids’ situations at different events. We towed out to the lanes as the third pairing down the race track with a pretty decent tune-up in the car. So, I’m in the car all ready to go, the first pair both cars go up instantly in tyre smoke, and I’m strapped in the car and yelling at the crew to make a whole pile of changes to the tune-up. The two cars in front of us don’t get down the track either, so I stick with the changes that we made from the first pair and just hope that we have detuned it enough. Well, the Kiwi left like a bullet, and, at about quarter track, it started to head over towards the wall. At this point, I couldn’t see the Chev, so I just kept my foot up it, cranked the wheel, and hoped that I could keep it off the wall. At about three-quarter track, I thought, Hmm, this is maybe a little too close to the wall, so I gave it a quick peddle and managed to keep it off the wall and still ran a 5.55 at only 247mph. Once I got out of the car, I was ecstatic to have finally beaten the Nitro Express, which had struggled with the track conditions on that particular run and smoked the tyres.

This put us back in contention for a podium. Now, the only problem was that I had drawn the second-most-successful car in the series next: the ‘Red Devil’ ’57 Chev — as if the first two rounds hadn’t been hard enough. We’ve had a pretty big battle with the red Chev lately, trading win lights, so this was going to be another tough one. This time, a 5.56 was enough to dispatch the Red Devil and put us in third spot on the podium. I was pleased with the performance of the car, and I was pleased with the third-place trophy, but to have beaten both ’57 Chevs on the same night considering the calibre of drivers and crew on those cars is something I’m very proud of. Yes, the first round cost us — but hey, that’s racing.

As for the Bandit and Kong, well, the Bandit ran two 5.50s, only missing out on the podium in the last round. Kong, on the other hand, made some good steps in the tune-up, but, unfortunately, a broken throttle clip and broken blower belt denied it any chance of a number on the board to represent the progress.

Did I mention that drag racing had its ups and downs?