BRIDESMAID AGAIN

Last month was a busy time, with the debut of ‘Spooky’ — check out last month’s NZV8 — and the big push to get it done to meet the deadline for the container heading towards New Zealand. What made it even busier was that, on the same day as the container was due to leave, we had to leave with ‘One Bad Kiwi’ and another six funny cars on the 14-hour drive to our next event in Portland, Victoria. Anyone who’s built a race car from a bare chassis and body knows the hours and hours that go into all those little things, and it’s a testament to the guys at the shop that they were able to get all the funny cars ready in the same time frame. It was our first time racing One Bad Kiwi at South Coast Raceway in Portland, and man what a cool track. It’s an eighth-mile (200m) track with a really cool regional feel. I said to one of the guys that it felt as if we were in the middle of America at some small-town racetrack. It was also the first time I had raced at an eighth-mile track. With a very short braking area, this was one event at which getting the parachutes out before the finish line was a big priority. I was again tuning One Bad Kiwi and ‘ The Bandit’, driven by Josh Leahy, so it was going to be another busy day. First round, we drew up against ‘ The Stormtrooper’ funny car, which is owned and driven by Josh’s dad Greg. This was a weird one; we were both in stage, and I was sitting there waiting for the flash of the lights, when, all of a sudden, I heard The Stormtrooper take off. I looked at my lights, thinking that I hadn’t seen the lights change. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the crisp white of The Stormtrooper going past the Christmas tree. I was sitting there on the start line, wondering, have I got this completely wrong or has he? Thankfully, at that moment, the LED bulbs on my side of the tree flashed and we took off in pursuit of Greg. We got the automatic win for his red-light, but with the Aeroflow Outlaw Nitro Funny Cars, it’s all about the show, so why not try to chase him down? Although we didn’t get him, our tyre-smoking pedalling 3.9-second pass would have been enough to beat him, had it been an even start. Second round, we had the ‘Let’s Boogie’ Mustang of Justin Walshe. We have raced Justin twice since joining the series and, although I have beaten him at the tree both of those times, he has beaten me where it matters — the finish line — so it was two-nil to him. This time, Justin beat me on the tree, but we managed to get the Kiwi to hook up and run the second fastest ET of the round to take the win. The only guy quicker than us was Shane Olive in ‘ The Red Devil’. Unfortunately for Shane, he raced Josh in The Bandit; Josh ran third quickest of the round but managed to slap a holeshot win on the hot favourite. So, going into the last round, there were three cars who were two wins from two races: ‘Nitro Express’, ‘LA Hooker’, and One Bad Kiwi. As much as it was cool being in the same company as these two historic cars, I wanted to win so badly. This was the third meeting in a row in which we’d headed into the last round on maximum points with a chance to win. The problem with running fastest in the second round was that we faced the most successful funny car in the series: Nitro Express. As we towed out, we saw LA Hooker get taken out by The Red Devil, so this was a winner-takes-all race. I had hotted the Kiwi up just a tiny bit, as I thought the track was going to get a bit better as the sun went down, but I didn’t want to beat myself. Well, unfortunately, the Kiwi did exactly that about quarter-track, and over-powered the track. About a second after that, so did Nitro Express. I managed to get the Kiwi hooked back up, but so did Rick Gauci in Nitro Express — and I just couldn’t catch him. So, for the third time in three meetings, I had the chance to win but failed at the last hurdle. I’ll tell you, this one was a very hard pill to swallow; I wanted it so bad for both the team and myself. As I write this, the Nitro hot rods are in New Zealand waiting for the Nostalgia Drags — more on that next month.