Monthly Archives: December 2015

The End of the 2015 Racing Season

The end of the season has come and gone, and I’m now prepping for winter projects. But before talking about that, I want to roll back to the last track trip of the season. As usual, I packed up and headed out to Milan Dragway for the last trip of the season.

I had known about a few friends who were also going, and we all met up for a trip we were all hopeful would be one of our best for each of us. I met up with Kiggly Racing and Warren from Antilag Racing.

A very long story short, the end of my season was a very hard and bad end to the season. Right off the bat, I blew up the intake manifold. This would normally end the day, but Erin from Kiggly Racing offered up the use of their garage which allowed Rick and I to re-weld the manifold and get the car back together. This left us with about 45 minutes before the end of the season to get up to the starting line. And it also lead to the second part of a very rough day.

The track prep wasn’t great. The track was getting colder as the sun was going down and getting in one run before the end of the season was all that was on my mind. I knew it wasn’t going to be a new personal best, but I wanted to end the season with another 8 second pass. Very quickly, I knew that wasn’t going to be the case because I ended up pedaling the throttle down the track, which is quite uncharacteristic of the car. After tripping the lights, I let off the gas and started to slow down. Unfortunately, when I was slowing down, the rear tires lost traction and the car became a huge handful. I kept it as straight as I was able to and tried to stay in my lane as best I could, but ended up tagging the wall with the front driver’s side of the car. As the front ricocheted off the wall, the back end of the car also tapped the wall. That took a lot of energy out of what I was doing and allowed me to finally get the car stopped.

I was fine, but the car wasn’t. I have a fair amount of repair to make over the winter. I’m starting now in order to get it under control. I hope I’m able to get the car updated and back out to the track at the beginning of the season.