2013 Festival of Power Race Report

So the new season is upon us and we've got a feeling that it's going to be a good'n! A brand new race surface had been laid and, with that in mind, a massive well done to Santa Pod's fantastic track crew for battling the rough conditions leading up to the event and prepping the track to a more than adequate standard, hat's off to you guys!

Forecasts for the first ever Festival of Power were not looking too bad at all which meant that Team Rampage were excited to get underway for the new season, albeit the temperatures were on set to be the coldest that we had ever raced in.

Saturday morning certainly proved that the temperatures were going to be difficult for some of the race cars to get down the track and so we acted upon this by tweaking the chassis a little to make sure that the rear got all the traction it needed. Being that Super Pro were to be the second class on following Pro ET, it was important that we knew what the Pro ET guys were doing in terms of their dial ins. After watching a number of runs, we decided that the track would just about hold up and made the decision to dial in an 8.05. Just as we started to pull round to begin the burnout, the heavens opened and sent us some snow. D'oh! There were a number of flurries on and off for about an hour, but once they had stopped, it was just the case of re-sledding the startline with rubber for the track crew, so it didn't take long to get going again. Well when the time came to run, we had slightly over anticipated the track resulting in a small amount of tyre spin off of the line and when combined with the car being all over the last 3/4 of the track, we ended up with a sluggish 8.25 at 166mph. Definitely room for improvement!

Photo courtesy of Kirstie Tramm at Eurodragster.com - All throughout the day, there were multiple snow flurries resulting in qualifying being very much a stop start situation for every class. However, the second run came in the late afternoon and was both good and bad in certain aspects. Knowing full well that the weather was all over the place, we decided to knock the dial in down a little bit and go for a 8.15. Well the car hooked up this time sending the dragster through the the 1/4 running an 8.07 breakout. Didn't really see that coming, considering so many of the other cars were still spinning the tyres off of the line! This ended up being the last run of the day and so we would have to wait till next morning to give it our next shot.

Sunday morning brought a bitter wind worse than Saturdays but the sun was out a little so not all bad! Following on from the previous run, we thought it would be a good idea to bring the dial back up to an 8.05. It was just our luck when the car really grabbed the track on the launch resulting in our one of our better 60ft times of 1.13. This quick burst resulted in all the time traps being a little quicker throughout the entire run which resulted in an 8.02 breakout. These few breakouts meant that we were slowly sliding down the qualification ladder and after the run we were in an uncharacteristic 16th place. With just one round of qualifying left, we really had to do something to get higher up the table.

The 4th round came at just past midday and Crew Chief Ian made the final decision to dial in 8.02 against the opinion of crew member Dan who was sure that it would run faster as it had been every single run up to then; his predication being an 8 flat. It was a solid burnout from Dave, he brought the car to the line, launched brilliantly, recording our quickest 60ft time ever of 1.11 and carried on right the way through, straight as an arrow...to an 8.001 breakout. What did Dan say beforehand?! Ian you're fired! This consequently resulted Team Rampage in being in a disappointing 18th overall place with the very first run of the weekend being the only run that would count. Therefore in the late afternoon we were to be up against Rick Cooke who had qualified a solid 7th.

Photo courtesy of Colin Donisthorpe at www.flickr.com/photos/colin_donisthorpe - It was time to race and it was fair to say that we were a little more nervous than usual. Looking over the data from the previous runs, combining it with the weather conditions at those times and then monitoring what the weather was doing just before the first round resulted in an agreed 7.98 dial in. Being that Rick had dialed in an 8.44, it would mean that he would get near enough half a second head start. Tension was fairly high at the time and we were hoping that we had predicted right. Rick left the line with a 0.15 reaction time and Dave quickly after with a fairly brisk 0.009 light. The quicker reaction from Dave meant that he had caught Rick earlier than the finish so he lifted off of the loud peddle rolling through with an 8.02 at 159mph, 0.04 from dial in. It would have been interesting to see what the time would have been if he had kept going, or maybe not! We would have to wait until Monday morning to race again.

Having got through the first round, we had to face an on form Scott Hauser in the second round in the newly built Hauser Race Cars 4-link dragster. There has been some close racing from Scott and Dave in the past, so this one would prove to be a good one, whoever would win. Come race time, we decided to lower our dial in a tad to a 7.99 knowing full well that we didn't want to give too much away. Scott had dialled in a faster 7.61 giving Dave nearly 4 tenths of a second head start. What a race it turned out to be! Near identical reaction times meant that it would be all down to who ran closer to their dial in. Side by side all the way up the track was a great sight to see but at the very last split second Scott just crept ahead, taking the stripe by just three hundredths of a second. We had ran an 8.03 and Scott a 7.62 which was were the race was marginally lost for us. Both Dave himself and Scott thought that Dave had won, which went to show how close it was. Just how racing should be! Scott progressed all the way to the final, so at least we could say we lost to a bloody good racer!

Even though that was the end of the meeting for us, we felt that the car had performed brilliantly in terms of consistency and we were already well up for The Main Event!

The Festival of Power was all in all a fairly decent weekend for Team Rampage despite qualifying not as well as we would have liked and going out early, but it was the first event in the new season and we weren't too sure how the car would cope with the cold conditions and new track surface so positives could be taken.

A massive thanks to this years sponsors: Mini Gears, All Aces Couriers and Payday Loans all to which your contributions are very much appreciated and we are happy to have you onboard. Hope to see some of you at the track soon!