Catastrophes and
what to do about them

3/7/03

Dale Wilson is a bracket racing "retiree" who was editor of Bracket Racing USA from 1991 to its demise in 1998. His latest dream is to return to racing in either a front-engine dragster, a slow motorcycle or the family Mazda wagon. Everything else he has is for sale.

Don't you just hate it when something goes wrong? If you've been bracket racing for any length of time, something will, often at the most inopportune time -- it's raining, or it's cold, or it's midnight, or it's all of that and more.

It's called a catastrophe in polite terms, a screw-up in street slang. It has happened to us all, especially the Wilson-Gaudsmith (Lady In Red, Boy In The Can) racing team. Oh, these catastrophes can be funny later on, but at the time, they seem like the end of our world as we know it. Here are just a few examples of what happened to us.

The first came more than 20 years ago, when wife Fran and I decided to get a taste of some long traveling and some NHRA Division 2 points racing at Moroso Motorsports Park, five hours from our Tampa, Florida home. We towed down state with another dragster aficionado, near-legendary bracket racer John Mella. We made it okay, but that's as far as the trip went.

On the last time pass of the day, the first catastrophe struck. They call us to the staging lanes, and I jump in my front-engine dragster and go tooling up there in a hurry, bound to be the first in line. But just as the car is about to make the transition from West Palm Beach sand to Moroso asphalt, the dragster flexes and hits the asphalt, which is a good two inches higher than the sand. The flex downward lands right on the dragster's master cylinder, breaking a weld. The push rod is just about hanging out of the cylinder.

I withdraw from competition without having made a single round. Fran, the mechanic, determines it can't be fixed, at least not here. John Mella red-lights in the first round, and so we all load up and head back to Tampa.

We hit Alligator Alley about 8 p.m. Mella is flying, at least 70, and I'm struggling to keep up. Suddenly we hit a bridge, and the trailer leaves the ground. I look back and see the 4th of July in the mirror, sparks flying off the trainer nose everywhere. We stop a half-mile later, the trailer jack buried in the soft south Florida sand and muck. The safety chains held. If not, the trailer would probably still be a gator home to this day; no way was I going in there to try and come-along it out of the swamp. We rig the trailer tongue up and limp home. Catastrophe No. 1 in our short log book of racing has just occurred.

Catastrophe No. 2 came at Sunshine Drag Strip in downtown (literally!) St. Petersburg, our Friday night track of choice. I had been running down an electrical problem all week and finally found it, and bolted the dragster's body together just in time to beat the Friday afternoon traffic across the Howard Franklin Bridge from Tampa. Cool! Ain't it great to be sneaking off from The Tampa Tribune at 4 p.m. on a Friday afternoon to go racing? I wonder what my boss, Lynne P., would think about one of her writers blasting down an eighth-mile dragstrip in an open car at 112 mph now?

Fran meets me at Sunshine just in time for the first time run, and so here I go, out of the water box and into the staging lights, and I'm off at 6,500 rpm, small-block blasting my ears. . .when all of a sudden I'm engulfed in smoke. White, acrid smoke. I can't see and I can't breathe, and Fran is back on the starting line saying to herself, "Why did he pop the parachute?" I didn't. A wire got hung up between the mid-mount plate and the dragster body, shorting everything out and leaving me in a coasting mode. I thought I blew an engine. The wiring was toast, and we were through for the night. That was my first experience in driving blind.

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