Day 3: Wednesday Sept 12
Zmax Dragway - twice the lanes, 4 times the facility. Man, that place is huge. I've never been to a place where you could drive around the facility so long and never even know there was a 4 lane drag strip there. They were parking RVs there because of the hurricane, unbelievable amount of parking space there. Just wow.
Unfortunately NHRA owns the rights to 4 wide so they were only running 2 lanes.
Boom! Not a personal best but the 10.62 @ 130 got us the Jeep ET record for Drag Week! Not a bad day at all, one and done again. We found out later that night that the 10.62 put us on the bump spot for the 32 car field.
Street tires back on but waiting for some cloud cover to re-pack.
We spectated at the track until racing was done because they cancelled the official route again - the only requirement was to stop at Pat Musi's shop on the way out. No big deal we though, going to be a short drive and an early night. WRONG. Right as we were leaving we got word that the event leader Tom Bailey needed help getting parts.
We were able to find the piston rings he needed in Mooresville at Prock Performance. Jeff Prock (yep, that Jeff Prock) was kind enough to open the shop for us and even gave us some shirts. Of course we had to get a picture of him with the Jeep. You can also see the tape on the hood - we decided on Sunday to run sealed hood for the week. It's a street car so why not.
We got the rings back to Bailey and heard more bad news, they had hurt some bearings too. Not to worry, they had already sourced parts from a place in.... Mooresville. So back to Mooresville we go again. The shop turns out to be HED that builds a lot of the max effort heads-up engines and Lyle Barnett was the guy we were dealing with. Was already in a hurry and completely forgot to get a picture of him with the Jeep. But did get a picture of a car in the shop.
Get back to Zmax again with the parts and a case of water. Oh yeah, forgot to mention water was like gold there. Every place was sold out because of the hurricane. Anyhow, they had found a damaged piston and were having it driven down from Michigan. We said our goodbyes and hit the road. Oh yeah, we need to get the picture in front of Musi's shop. Where's that? Mooresville again!!!
Driving through the night on twisty mountain roads was not well advised for a lot of competitors. This poor guy wadded up a really nice car but luckily both driver and passenger were fine.
Got to the hotel a little after 2am completely exhausted. Posted this picture on facebook just before I fell asleep which turned out to be a huge clue to some tricky friends.
