First time to the strip was Cedar Creek in the early 90's. Cool little 1/8 mile track & it's still there.
We had just put a new cam, heads and a 9" in my old 70 AMX and the track was having a "true" street car shoot out, so we figured what the hell, we can do this. Cars just needed to be tagged & inspected, have full exhaust and no slicks where allowed.
Sounded easy enough. The car was loaded on the trailer and we got the exhaust and inspection done at a buddy's shop on the way.
Everything was looking promising. There were 3 of us trying to pull this off. 2 of us had never been to the track before and the car had less than 20 minutes of run time on a completely new set up... what could go wrong?
Well, apparently, everything.
The new headers cooked the old starter, so we had to pop the clutch coming off the trailer so the damn thing would start. Found a starter at the local Chief's and we were back in business.
Finally made it to the burn out box and the car sputtered and died. Learned a pretty valuable lesson about cheesy crimp connectors!
Third try wasn't the charm either. Burnout went well and managed to stage ok. Plan was to launch around 2k and once the car was rolling, just mat it. Instead, I just dumped the clutch around 4500, blew the tires off and heard a huge bang from the rear end. Somehow, the left rear spring shot part of the lower leaf out the back. Only thing that worked in our favor was the spring cleared the car in the box behind us. This was also my first red light.
At that point we loaded the car back up and it has yet to make a pass down the strip to this day.
First time at a track with an actual race car was Thunder Valley. It was a friend of a friends IHRA Nostalgia Funny Car and a group of drivers rented the track for the day. It was a blast. We were just slave labor. We weren't allowed to touch much but got real good at filling oil jugs and cleaning everything.
We had just put a new cam, heads and a 9" in my old 70 AMX and the track was having a "true" street car shoot out, so we figured what the hell, we can do this. Cars just needed to be tagged & inspected, have full exhaust and no slicks where allowed.
Sounded easy enough. The car was loaded on the trailer and we got the exhaust and inspection done at a buddy's shop on the way.
Everything was looking promising. There were 3 of us trying to pull this off. 2 of us had never been to the track before and the car had less than 20 minutes of run time on a completely new set up... what could go wrong?
Well, apparently, everything.
The new headers cooked the old starter, so we had to pop the clutch coming off the trailer so the damn thing would start. Found a starter at the local Chief's and we were back in business.
Finally made it to the burn out box and the car sputtered and died. Learned a pretty valuable lesson about cheesy crimp connectors!
Third try wasn't the charm either. Burnout went well and managed to stage ok. Plan was to launch around 2k and once the car was rolling, just mat it. Instead, I just dumped the clutch around 4500, blew the tires off and heard a huge bang from the rear end. Somehow, the left rear spring shot part of the lower leaf out the back. Only thing that worked in our favor was the spring cleared the car in the box behind us. This was also my first red light.
At that point we loaded the car back up and it has yet to make a pass down the strip to this day.
First time at a track with an actual race car was Thunder Valley. It was a friend of a friends IHRA Nostalgia Funny Car and a group of drivers rented the track for the day. It was a blast. We were just slave labor. We weren't allowed to touch much but got real good at filling oil jugs and cleaning everything.
