1st Race for the Nova after Rebuild Completed

Old Blue is finally back after 4 long years where she was stripped all the way down and completely rebuilt. After a bit of thrashing, we were able to make it to the MAKO Real Street race at MoKan Dragway on October 20th.  Thanks to my friend Danny McKarnin who loaned me a trailer, and my fiance wife Chris who worked her tail off helping get the car ready, we were able to make the last race of the season.

First pass off the trailer we ran it on the motor as I wanted to make sure everything worked, and thought it might be a good idea as I’m very rusty not driving for the last 4 years. It went a lazy 6.19@116 which didn’t set any records, but I wasn’t surprised it was a bit slow since we were only running it on 30 degrees of timing (nitrous baseline).  Good news is it didn’t get hot, nothing fell off and other than a little too much oil in the dry sump which blew out and got on the header, it ran without a hitch.

2nd pass we decided enough of that and turned the bottle on. Ol’ Blue responded with a 5.30@136  and a 1.30 60′, not too shabby as that’s about as fast as it has ever went before but with a lot less nitrous and a real lazy launch on the progressive. What I was really impressed with was how stable the car was, before on a run like that it would be drifting around downtrack a bit, but this time I swear I could have taken my hands off the wheel and it would have drove itself. So that’s certainly an improvement! I’m not sure if that was due to the weight changes, the new 25.3 cage, or what, but it sure was nice to drive.

[singlepic id=38 w=320 h=240 float=right]3rd pass, some dummy flooded the engine in the staging lanes. Never had that happen before, and the way it was acting I thought the timing was way off so we pushed it back to the pits. After doing some inspection I tried it a few minutes later and it fired right up. Duh.. Ok, well we’re qualified anyway, so it’s not a big deal.

4th pass which was the 1st round of A Field eliminations, that same dummy forgot to turn the Nitrous switch on. So we lost that one quite fast as we were racing Johnston in Chris Rose’s old Mustang which was running in the 5.20’s – he would have probably easily beat me anyway, so again no big deal but I was kicking myself for wasting the pass regardless.  Just a matter of getting back into a routine during staging, did I mention I need more seat time??

[singlepic id=37 w=320 h=240 float=right]MAKO has a 2nd Chance race for those that lose 1st round, so we got to run that one.  With no changes in the tune up, it went another 5.30@135 on a competition bye run.  Next in round 2 we met Mike White in the awesome Malibu. Mike stepped his up a bit and killed me on the tree, he went 5.38 to my 5.32, which would have got the win if it wasn’t for my turtle like reflexes haha.

So, got knocked out, but hey I wasn’t expecting much, just hoping nothing would fall off and we didn’t tear it up, so all in all we had a very good outing. The car ran pretty darn good with a best 60′ of 1.27 on some 4 year old tires that had 20 passes on them already. So we’re pretty happy with how it turned out. We have a few more projects to finish up on the car this winter but no major work so you can bet it’ll be ready to rock and roll 1st race in 2013!  I have a feeling I need to practice cutting a light over the next few months…