DragRacingOnline.com - Drag Racing from a different perspective!

Rob Mansfield’s
Rookie IHRA Pro
Stock Season Diary

PART 2

By Rob Mansfield
Photos by Billy Carroll
7/9/04

he IHRA AC Delco Nationals at Virginia Motorsports Park have come and gone. Since then, I’ve been thinking about what to write for you, about what someone who is not doing this would find interesting and surprising. My first thought is of the large number of people needed and of how much time and work goes into just one race. The events at Virginia are a perfect example of this.

The first surprise going into this event for our team was that we actually arrived at the races with repair work to do. The car was slated to leave in the truck on Wednesday with Billy and Mike. The rest of us were flying into Richmond on Thursday night with Bob coming in early Friday. Well, on Wednesday morning, during a warm up session at the shop, a piece of linkage fell off the motor into the Jessel belt, damaging it. We didn’t have another belt in the shop so, the car left as is with us knowing we were going to have to fix it on Friday morning (the soonest we could actually get a new belt) before first round qualifying.

Despite this, we were coming in with great expectations. We had known at the previous event that we were down on power and sent the motor to Sonny Leonard to be freshened with great results. In addition, Billy and Mike had just spent two full days at the shop going over every inch of the chassis, setting up the ride height, shocks, weight ratios, etc. and things were looking great.

After landing at the Richmond airport at 10 p.m. Thursday, getting to the track at midnight to sign-in, going to the hotel to check in at 1 a.m., then being back at the track Friday morning at 7 a.m., the weekend was off to a busy start. Surprise number two came when our last crew member’s Friday morning flight, due in at 10:30, got bumped until 2:30 p.m., getting him in during first round qualifying. We are a seven-member team, so it doesn’t seem like it would be a big deal for one person to miss a round. But everyone has their own duties and consistency counts. The last minute is not a great time to divide up extra tasks and hope everyone remembers them. And remember, we only get three attempts to qualify.

IHRA expected us up at the staging lanes an hour before any round of qualifying was due to start, so we needed to be ready by 1 p.m. on Friday for first round qualifying. This was because we were not allowed to run our own fuel. IHRA fueled the car in the staging lanes and then pulled a fuel sample after the run to make sure that this was the fuel we used.

ADVERTISEMENT

The result of this is that as a driver you go up to the staging lanes focused entirely on driving your best and concentrating on the coming round. You try to stay focused, but fans and friends come around and want to talk. You don’t want to be rude, but it’s all about the run. At Virginia, Jeff Burk, the man behind this publication, came up to talk to me and I was so focused on the run that I didn’t even recognize his name!

After first round Friday, we were twenty-second in the field and not qualified. We had some work to do and this is where the surprising number of people I mentioned earlier came into play. In addition to every member of our team working, we had some help from Sonny Leonard, Dale from CFM, Tim from RacePak, and John Bartunek and crew getting ready for the next round.

Saturday qualifying rounds were at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. The car looked good, the weather looked good and we felt good. We were confident that we would run well. We did, but so did the competition. When it was over we had run a best time of 6.612 at 213.27 mph, putting us twentieth in the field with the eighth fastest speed. We know now that the car easily has it in it to qualify well, but we have some fine-tuning to do.

A team decision has been made to sit out the first Canadian race. We feel we will accomplish more to stay in the United States and test. With the race schedule now having biweekly events and us being in South Florida, it will take us so much time going to Canada and back that we will have no time to test if we attend. That said, it’s still hard to miss a race! We are happy to have improved at every event and we are dying to get into the show. I look forward to the day I can write about eliminations.