The success of the first ever Dragstalgia can only be described as fantastic. Not only because of the amount of nostalgic race cars that had entered, but also for bringing back all the traditions, that these days health and safety have restricted. The cackle fest, flame burnouts, even the good old christmas tree was brought out, totally refurbished.
The event for Team Rampage was an absolute blast, and thanks must go out to Santa Pod's track crew, doing an awesome job as ever. Having looked at every possible weather forecast, they were all unanimous in saying that it was going to bucket it down pretty much all day. But this was until our prayers to the weather gods were answered by providing the event with rays of sunshine from around 3:00pm onwards, and this time it was the turn of our rookie driver Dave King, who had previously been up the track a couple of times. We had chosen to enter into Wild Bunch for the meeting, having done a few meetings before in the class and being more than happy to enter again. The first run was somewhat wasted, as we decided beforehand to change the rpm chip to shift at 6000 instead of the usual 5400, but as forgetful as we are, we didn't tell Dave that and he thought the engine was revving much too high forcing him to come on and off the throttle going through the traps running 12 seconds.
The decision was therefore made to put the chip back to the original shift point of 5400rpm, and being that Dave was launching the car using only the throttle and not the launch button, his second run was a more respectable 9.90. This was however the end of the day for racing, but certainly not the end of the day in terms of entertainment! All the late evening shows proved to be well worth staying the night, it was made even better when the beers came out!
Sunday morning, in the earlier hours of around 4:00am, looked promising as the sun was actually shining at this time, but it wasn't until someone jinxed it that it became cloudier. Eventhough this was the case, the forecast for the day was supposed to be slightly better than Saturday's, and it wasn't until we were a few pairs away from the first run of the day when it started spitting. This lasted around 40 minutes, but as it was only light, the track wasn't too badly effected, resulting in the track crew taking little time to dry it. We had said in the morning that we would run a 9.8 because in Wild Bunch its about getting as close to your predicted E.T but without dialing it in into the timing system, and to our delight, the funny car ran a 9.816, thats bracket racers for you! This put us into the number two spot, which we gladly took, however once again the good old british weather spoilt the opportunity for another run, right before we were due to run too, and the race director decided to call the meeting off as the cut off point for the racing had already passed. So Team Rampage at least went home with the runners up trophy, and big thanks to the organisers of Wild Bunch Claire and Chris, we had a great weekend in your class, cheers for letting us in! And of course the Rampage crew of Jeff, Ian, Graham and Daniel, and last but not least our sponsors, much appreciated.
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