FHRA Nitro Nationals - Alastaro

Land of lakes and forests, but what makes lakes and forests, yes RAIN.  Despite being a glorious day on Thursday, when Friday came around sure enough it was raining!!  By mid afternoon it had cleared up and qualifying began.  Unfortunately due to a lengthy clean up of the track due to an oil down, and a couple of crashes, we just missed our opportunity to make a qualifying run on Friday as the track had to close at 6 o’clock because of local noise restrictions so a very frustrating day for us as we had a very specific program of different modifications to try and now the possibility of only getting two runs on Saturday forced us into compromising our set program by trying more than one change at a time.

Saturday – as one of the pro classes not able to run on Friday we were given a run just after the track opened in order to catch up with the others.  Well we clearly over estimated the ability of the track to deal with our horsepower and the result was an instantly smoking set of rear tyres.

Back in the pits we checked everything over, made a few adjustments to the horsepower level and then went out for our second qualifier.  Success, a much better run, 5.54 at only 252 mph showed that we had gone in the right direction but maybe just a little too far.  It’s a tricky little devil this A-fuel car but we are getting better at judging how big an adjustment to make, sometimes!!  As eliminations will show.

Sunday – race day and we are paired with Fred Hansen, a new guy from Norway and an addition to our friends the Islanders Race Team and he has Will Hanna, who I know from the States, tuning for them.  A formidable opponent but we are up for it.  Our best reaction time for the weekend but as on our first qualifier, instantly up in smoke and Fred disappears into the distance, we lose.  When we get back to the pit we are told that due to a start line infringement on Fred’s car he is disqualified and we WIN.  Not the way you want to do it but sometimes you have to take what you can get!  So now we have very little time to ready the car for the next round.  It’s in my mind that exactly one year ago in a similar position we failed to make the car ready in time and lost out, but this time we are better prepared with more experience of this engine and more spare parts courtesy of Silverline and PlayStation so we can change parts instead of having to mend them and that speeds up our turn round time.  Races are not just won on the track, sometimes they are won in the pit.

Semi final round and we are paired with Timo who leads the championship points, we have to calm the car down to make it go faster and we do succeed managing a 5.56 @ 263 mph but its not quick enough to win.  Weekend over.  Partly we got the result we wanted after our stellar performance at Santa Pod, less engine damage, more consistency, more experience at adjusting the tune up but not enough runs and track time.

Dave Wilson