Think about solving your racing problems

11/7/03

ow is it that some people can buy a used car and get thousands of miles of service out of it, while another will have the transmission drop right out of the car and onto the pavement before he or she can even get it home?

I guess wife Fran and I are of the latter variety of folk. It seems as if ever since she got her hands on our "new" '89 Suncoast Race Cars dragster, we've had nothing but trouble out of it. Not that it's not a basically sound rear-engine dragster, it's just that our luck with it hasn't gone right since we trailered it home back in the summer of this year.

Fran, you may recall, had her "Lady In Red" '71 Nova since 1990, raising it from a 16-second "pup," as friend and NHRA Super Comp world champ Sherman Adcock once put it, into a solid 10-second stormer. It made several covers of my old magazine, "Bracket Racing USA" (boo-hoo; R.I.P.), and when she traded it for the dragster this past June, it went with every good piece we put on it. Its present owner, John Hobbs of Conyers, Georgia, and wife Helen won so much with it at the Putt-Putt Bush Headhunters Motorcycle Club track in Eatonton this summer that the owners were seriously thinking of asking them to stay home one or two Sundays a month, just to give someone else a chance at winning a Super Pro bracket race.

Meanwhile, Fran has made only four passes down a drag strip, two of them troubled.

Wanting to play the racing association game right, she first had to get a new roll cage put on the car in order for it to pass inspection and get its certification. Since the "old" roll cage was only a year or so old, and since it failed tech, Fran got a new one courtesy of the guy who welded on its previous cage. But then we had to have some other updates, and $900 later, Mr. Suncoast was sitting in its trailer, ready for bracket battle. To win the NHRA certification, we had to pay about $200 for a certification sticker, which included mileage paid to the inspector, plus other costs.

But we weren't ready yet. Then it was on to the alcohol carburetor dial-in, which took a month or so of fooling around with plumbing, where to hang what, listening to this expert or that, changing jets, changing bowls, changing parts, changing this and that and changing the other. By now it's late October and the big-money bracket bashes are just beginning. We wanna be ready to go.