Open Sport Nationals Race Report: Tuesday 25th August

Well they say a picture tells a thousand words and I think the photo below is self-explanatory…

It was a good weekends racing and I think we did well to win with the silly problems that we had.

We were all ready to run early Saturday morning and I had decided to take timing out of the car and add some fuel to lose some power as we had seen that the track was going to be tricky, not really how we like to do things but we wanted to get from A to B.

First run we just wanted to get it down there, didn’t really care what the ET was just wanted to make sure that we got into the finals, it left well with a 1.01 60 foot, tamer motor showing by the 330 foot as it only ran a 2.81 there, but having spoken to my dad after the run, he said after the 1/8th it got very lose and he lifted at about the 800 foot mark, so when a 6.79 at 168mph popped up I was very surprised, as was he, he said it felt like an 8.

As there had been a couple of oil downs that day we only got the one run in, once the car was serviced we
all did something we had not done for years and had a few beers in the clubhouse, made a really nice
change to relax for abit and not be working on the car on a Saturday night!

Early on Sunday morning we all walked the track and the track crew had done an excellent job getting it
prepped considering the issues that they had on the Saturday. We gave the car a very good clean and
polish using our excellent Autoglym products and we were ready and hoping for another good ET to make
sure that we got into the final.

We were paired against Venom, it was a good race until about 500 foot out when we got some tyre shake
and one of the chutes popped out, I turned around and walked off, knowing that it meant we had lost the
round. Still the 7.4 that came up on the boards was good enough for us to qualify number one for the 2nd
time and make our third consecutive final.

As you can imagine pulling a chute along for 800 feet is going to heat the clutch a tad so soon as we were
back to the pits we pulled it to pieces and checked it all over, all was ok, although the clutch release
bearing had collapsed, replaced this, fitted all back together and we were sorted for the final, again against
the very consistent Freddy’s revenge.

Chaos and Rebel ‘T’ ran just before us and laid down a 6.77 and a 7.09 so we new the track was good,
so we hoped for a mid 6 and 200mph+ but this was not to be, a normal tame burnout from us and we
backed up and completed our normal start line procedure, although in the other lane I think that they had
a oil leak, I did wait as long as I could but as people can understand we have a lot of money in our engine
and I didn’t want to sit there waiting for too long, we were told we would have a solo and my old man
staged the car, when it left I new it was not going to be a good run, the revs of the motor stayed the same and it was clear there was a problem in the Lenco, it didn’t shift into 2nd or 3rd properly hence only a 7.20 at 187mph, I suspect when we pull the Lenco apart we will be replacing a lot of the clutches and floaters, still we got the win and no it wasn’t pretty but were now top of the NFAA points and hoping for good things at the National Finals.

Also would like to say a big thank you to the crew, we all worked together so well and got the car turned around quickly and with no drama.

And to all of Bennett Racings sponsors, we really could not do this without you and were paying back your commitment with 3 NFAA event wins in a row and top of the points.