5th december - Bennett Racing

Looking to 2009: Friday 5th December

It has been a long time since I have written an entry to our Blog but things have been very busy with the Bennetts. I recently had an important hospital appointment and no new tumours or anything were found so all is good, just got to have blood tests every three months for two years now. Been a hard year but the support of fellow racers and fans has helped a lot. So thanks to all.

The Relentless Fuel Altered will have a few changes for next year; we will be switching to titanium valves as we intend to up the revs for next year as we haven't pushed the motor at all yet and have only ever revved to 8,200 rpm. And with the Kobelco on there too the power is in abundance so more revs will be even more power. Other changes will be mostly cosmetic and also we will be fitting our data logger as we have run without one until now, and tuned by reading the parts on the car. AIM supplied the data logger and we will run it with exhaust gas temperatures, fuel pressure, oil pressure, blower boost, engine rpm and input shaft rpm. This will give us bigger clues as to what the motor and clutch are doing and will aid in fine-tuning.

We should also hopefully have a new set up next year also, including a new lorry, new awning, new tow van so our pit should look smarter and more professional, important to keep and attract new sponsors.

Although we didn't do anything notable ET wise this year for us we sorted a huge amount of problems on the car and learnt a lot too, we are always learning and never assume that we know everything as with these motors there are always new things to learn and improve.

We were chuffed with the performance of the car though, the best time was a 7.66 half pass as the speed was only 133 mph, we also got our first 0.9 sixty feet too on the car's first pass although the car decided to take off soon after with all four wheels off the ground.

Our aim for 2009 is to win the NFAA Championship and I think it will be the hardest year by far as many of the cars in the class are not easy to beat and will be tough competition, but this is the way it should be we are pure racers at heart and all we want to do is race as fast as possible.