It’s another beautiful day of sunshine and cooler weather. The activities start a little earlier on Sunday so we were able to make our first qualifying run for the Quick Sixteen at 10:34am. The INS dragster ran a 7.738@172.87 mph which was the quickest we had gone all weekend. Along with a .019 RT we were off to a great start. There were approximately 22 cars trying to qualify for the sixteen spots available. Last time I believe the bump spot was somewhere around 7.86 ET which is faster than the INS dragster has ever gone.
The second round of qualifying came at 11:27am. Again I had a good light, a .020 RT. We ran a 7.784@172.34 mph which meant that we did not improve our position. Our third and final qualifying round came at 12:40pm. This time my RT was .015. We ran a 7.74 ET@172.54 mph. Qualifying was over. We made the bump (I believe we qualified #12) and would get to race in the quick sixteen. That was great because we were still in second place.
As race time approached I felt confident we would do well. At 1:45pm I pulled into the staging lanes. Qualifying in the bottom half of the field means that you do not get lane choice. Sure enough my opponent put me in the dreaded right lane. There is a bump in the right lane that the INS dragster does not like, and we are usually not as quick. We were ready to go with a 7.75 as our dial for the right lane.
I suppose I would have to say a flawless weekend quickly went south as I had a .008 red light and lost. I had eight previous runs and all my lights were great. To add insult to injury, I ran a 7.75. Had I gone green it would have been very tough to beat. A lot of good that does. Oh well, what can I say but “That’s racing”. All in all it was a great weekend for racing, and the car performed very well. We lost one spot, falling to sixth in Super Pro, but remain in second place by one point in the Quick Sixteen with only one race to go in this special race. We will have to wait until the end of September to catch the outcome. Stay tuned.
