They started sending class cars down the race track at 10:30AM with mixed results, the cool track, combined with far better air than we had seen all week meant more than a few were struggling with traction, or their tune up. I was the first of our group to make my way to the lanes. The staging lanes at Great Bend are unique in that they are just an extension of the strip, so they are long, straight and narrow, and we were only using two lanes. This means you have to stick close to your car, because the line is constantly moving forward, ordinarily that would seriously cut into my social and spectator time, but with the current weather I was happy to sit in the car and fire it up to move three or four car lengths at a time. Boone brought the Barnyard up next, and was around 15 cars of so behind me. Rain started speckling my windshield at 11:15, about the same time Rachael showed up with breakfast, she gave Boone and I ours in the lanes so we just sat in the Valiant and ate as we watched just enough moisture landing on the car to keep us from racing. After we finished off our food, and it became apparent that the rain wasn't letting up, we decided to abandon our vehicles in the lanes, and walk over to the pit to grab some drinks and see what everyone else was doing.
Dale had the distributor out of the Dakota after another failed attempt to set the timing and idle, and had locked out the timing curve. "I told Darren we had to lock it out because it had like fifty degrees of swing, and he swore it should only have twenty. We re-installed it and still had like twenty or thirty, so I pulled it again...look at that intermediate shaft". I bent over and peered inside the engine. The bronze gear, and the cam gear looked fine, no excessive wear or slop, but the slot in the middle that actually drives the distributor had a huge section broken out and gone on one side! "Wow, I've never seen a failure or problem there in any of the big blocks we've ever had." "Nope, I haven't either", Dale agreed, "But the guy who owned this previously had an ancient magneto in it when Darren first brought it home".
