Again the weather is nice and cool. We left home around 6am for Earlville with anticipation of a great weekend of racing, great weather, and visiting with many of our racing friends. It is easy to see why they call this a family sport. Pretty much everyone is one big happy family and most are willing to do anything they can to help you when needed.
We are wanting to move into the top five in points this week in the Super Pro class, so we need to have a good performance from the INS dragster (and driver)! The first run was a good pass for starters. We ran a 7.78 ET at 171.66 mph. The second pass was much the same as we ran a little quicker at 7.76 ET at 173.07 mph. Around 11am we headed back to the staging lanes for our third time run and this is when things changed. As I am driving up to the lanes, I hear a noise that I am unfamiliar with. Sure enough I was right. The car shook and popped once, and I immediately shut the car off. I honestly thought my timing belt or one of the other belts had come off. I unbuckled, climbed out, and saw that everything on the outside was in place. We pushed back to the trailer, removed the left side valve cover, and much to my suspicion had broken the rocker arm on the exhaust side of the number seven cylinder. Unless we can find some one carrying a spare we are done for the weekend.
We made several calls to other racers and to my engine builder to no avail. We definitely were done racing for the weekend. The bright side of things is that it is the first time I have had any engine problems in several years and I hope it’s the last. At this point we got the replacement parts ordered (with a spare) and presently do not think we hurt any other pieces. If that’s true, I was very lucky. I mean VERY LUCKY!!!
