The first pair of Street Machine Eliminator cars went down the track at 1:35pm to open the day's festivities.
"11:19 is the Quick 32 bump going into today", Freigburger noted, "So that's the number these competitors are shooting for!"
"It should be pointed out", Lohnes added in, "Each of the racers have completed Drag Week 2016 when they take the tree and break the beam, whether they decide to make another pass or not, so you may see a show of emotion when they return to the pits!"

The first pair down was Brian Peterson's Denmark based C3 '80 Corvette against Jeff Dean's Duramax diesel powered '77 Cadillac Coupe DeVille. Brian's 10.45-129 would slot the black 'Vette in the 5th qualifying spot while Jeff's Caddy belched smoke to an 11.58-115. The big white two door luxury barge would finish with an 11.62-114.9 five day average, good for 45th place in SME.

Dale pulled the front clip off the Gremlin, and removed the plugs. He borrowed a compression tester from Jesse Madaffari and ran through all the cylinders one by one. I walked over after sending Rachael to the lanes in the Belvedere, and looked down at the numbers scrawled on a piece of paper:

170----170
90-----30
30-----0
170----170

"Wow, that's pretty bad...", I stopped because I didn't know what else to say.
"Yeah", Dale laughed, "she's pretty used up, so I put 175 on the first hit and 200 on the second...hopefully that will get her there."