I arrived home at 11:45 pm last night after a harried and hectic, yet totally enjoyable weekend in northern Nevada. We left Friday afternoon at 4:30 pm with the Charger in tow. I had just installed the new driveshaft, trans tail housing and electronic speedo earlier in the day, and all the other details could be addressed once we arrived. We rolled into Ely, NV at 3am to our glorious Motel 6 accomodations, at which they so graciously "left the light on for us." Registration opened at 8:30 and tech ended at noon, so we needed to finish up some details. First and foremost was the discovery made at 3:15 am thet the rules required arm restraints in the 125mph class, and we had missed that completely up to that point. After some discussion and debates, including the possibility of having to drive to Reno to get some from Summit, we decided to make our own. A pair fo dog leashed and collars ended up fitting the bill perfectly, and if you didn't know any better, they looked the same as everyone else except without the padding. Second up was the speedo that still didn't work. I had just installed a new electronig 160mph Autometer speedo but it would not read at all. It powered up, but no signal. I had to tear the dash apart again to finally find the signal wire had come loose. A quick reconnect and we were on our way to calibrate. Finally, we got through registration and passed tech at noon, so we had the rest of the day to socialize, and eventually work on the alignment, adjust tire pressures, and go over course notes. We even found a guy on the pit crew of one of the 150 class racers who would put his rental car on our trailer and drive our truck down to the finish line. That saved us over 300 miles of back tracking after the race. For the first time, unlike last time, we were not in a mad rush every second prior to race day.
...or so we thought...
Race day arrived at 6am, and we were ready. We caravaned out with our police escort to the staging area where we were sorted out to go down to the starting grid. We would be 52nd to leave. Our turn came around, and we rapidly got up to our target speed, and with 9.5 miles, we had brough our average speed up to 125 mph as planned. We then bumped the speed up to 130 to bank some time for the windy section called the narrows, where we wanted to be able to slow down to about 95 to make the corners without drama. We had passed flag stations 1 and 2 (out of 9) when it happened. A red flag 28 miles into the race. That means pull over and stop as fast as safely possible. Red flags are oly pulled when there is a wreck thar requires clearing off the road or medical attention. We turned on the emergency radios and listened in. After 1/2 hour of simply "stand by" we were instructed to procede at the posted speed limit to flag station 3 and await further instructions. In this situation, the race is either called off, or restarted from stations 3 and 6. In the case of the racers restarting from 3, all our progress up to 3 is thrown out and we essentially start over again with the remaining 59.88 miles of the 90 mile race. Sounds good but when all your notes are for manipulating a moving average starting at 0 and progressing over 90 miles, the notes now mean precisely squat. ...and thats the better of the 2 scenarios. The racers restarting from 6 had to throw out everything from 3 to 6 and try and get the moving average they had from 0 to 3 to work with the new average from 6 to finish and come out on target. The stick with that is that most guys didn't know exactly where they were at 3, much less reestablishing a new average for the remaining 28 miles of the course that would allow them to get through the narrows at a reduced speed and back on track before the finish. Everyones notes are progressive, and having to figure out a restart means all your target times are useless.
Back to the situation at hand. After 1.5 hours we were ready to restart. I had been burning up a ball point pen madly recalculating by hand all of my new times for waypoints. I also realized that although my new and improved notes for this race told me where and what all the turns were, I didn't use enough fixed reference points, like mile markers to check my time against. I was forced to use things like rumble strip start and end points for reference.
The flag fell and we were off again and up to nearly 140 right off the bat to build our cushion back into the average before we hit the narrows. Upon entry to the narrows we had banked 1:12, so we slowed all the way down to 90 for the 5 mile section of tight turns. My "accelerate to 125" mark was the beginning of the next rumble strip... ...which no longer existed. by the time we saw the next waypoint we were over a minute behind and only had 11 miles to go. We put it at 138 (we can only do 140 or we'll be DQ'd) for the duration and still came in about 40 seconds late. To put this in perspective, last time we were 4 seconds back and came in 13th. Positions 1-4 were less than 1 second off.
After the race, we started looking for the guy with my truck, and we learned a bit of info... It was his driver that wrecked at 165mph. Tread separation of the left front caused them to veer off the road and tumble end over end for nearly 300 feet. Both driver and navigator were ok, but still had to be taken in for observation. We stayed around and helped him get the car recovered after the race.
End result: 9th place. All but 2 of our class were caught in the restart, so it was really just a crap shoot. Winner was 1.5 seconds off, 2nd and 3rd were 2 seconds off, 4th was 8 seconds off, everyone else was over 30.
Here's a few shots of the Mustang. It left the road just to the left of where the tail pipe is blocking your view of the road. It cleared the barbed wire fence the jackets are hanging from. It was a real "R" Mustang with huge amounts of custom fab done, including setting the engine back in the chassis, etc... The owner/driver owns a performance shop for this type of racing and has been doing this race and many like it for 15+ years.
