So, here we are just past our Wally weekend. What's a Wally you ask, well it is a special trophy that we race for only once a year commemorating Wally Parks, the founder of NHRA. For us this is a special weekend and many drivers come out only for this one weekend. Needless to say, competition was tough and we actually posted our best finish to date along with our best qualifying for the year.
We started off with a few test-n-tune passes to get over the red light syndrome. I guess that worked because we ended up posting a qualifying pass good enough to get number 1 qualifier on the night. A .502 light is what it took to get there and we did it. That put us in the bye run for the 1st round eliminations. From there we raced another two rounds to get to the semi-finals. Including a pass against a multi-time track champion and we beat them.
On to the semi-final against another strong competitor. Matt is good on his lights and is a very consistent competitor. Unfortunately I let that get into my head and I upped my launch RPMs, left on my normal light, and just turned the light red. The sad thing is that if I had cut a decent light I would have won that race with a 12.018 on a 12.0 dial to his 14.2446 on a 14.20 dial. If we had won, that would have set us up for an all Mopar final round.
To date, we have exceeded our goals and have performed much better than we would have expected. I just have to get better on my lights and quit turning them red. I think as soon as I can do that, we will be a force to be reckoned with. So far, all of our losses except one have been due to turning the light red. As soon as I can get that out of my system we will be going more rounds and getting in a better position to win. Until then, we will keep trying and get as far as we can get.