It took Dale about five miles of driving on I-70 to figure out what the problem was with the Gremlin. If he could keep it in cruise mode with his foot on the throttle like an egg shell everything seemed to be ok. With all the rolling hills in this part of Illinois, that wasn't possible, and when you rolled into the throttle to pull a hill, the transmission or the convertor would feel like it was in a bind and start slowing the car. When this would happen, if you gave it more throttle to overcome the binding sensation, you could immediately feel heat being generated into the floor pan, and the transmission would begin to momentarily lose drive like you were pushing in a clutch and letting it back out. The only other option was to roll back out of the throttle, and allow the car to lose speed until the problem would free up and return to normal operation. On some of the long hills that meant he was on the shoulder and down to 20-25MPH.
They limped into the first checkpoint just as Eddie's Duster and Luke in the white Maverick were leaving and the Gremlin would barely pull itself up to the fake old time gas station for their pictures.

The three of us had made the relatively easy thirty-five mile drive to the second checkpoint, and the time stamp on the pictures indicate about an hour between the two stops including talking to other drag weekers, getting our cars staged for pictures and such, so we felt pretty good about our progress.