My first doorslammer experience

TOP DOORSLAMMER LICENSING

Since we started drag racing about 15 years ago my dream was to one day get to drive dads doorslammer. Recently this dream became reality.

My first ever drive came on the 6th August at a WSID bracket meet. With new crew, new driver and a relatively new engine/chassis combination we didn’t expect much.

The first hurdle was to get the burnout out of the way, as i found out this isn’t as easy as it appears I liken it to running in marshmallow shoes along a log floating in water.

On my first launch things went pretty quick but to my relief the blower belt came off cause I wasn’t ready for anything more than a 60ft shut off. The belt smashed the rpm pickup, but we fixed it. I think we got 4 runs in total and the furthest I drove was 330ft. The best news of the day was that I did a 0.999 60ft which is pretty quick, don’t care whoyare, however all day I didn’t get anywhere near doing a burn out “right”.

I had my second chance at licensing on 27^th August at a WSID test & tune. We had problems getting the car to go straight at the launch. It picked the front wheels up hard and turned left around 60ft again. We spent the whole day trying to counteract this problem with no reward other than some more quick 60′s. On 30th August two days before the east coast nat’s I was invited by Robin Judd to attend a private test. This was my last chance to get my license to run in the nat’s which I had entered. The weather wasn’t good, it rained until lunchtime. Luckily the afternoon cleared up and we got 2 good passes in, to tame the car down, I left in 2nd gear. slow but you can steer when the wheels are on the ground. First run I was suppose to shut off at half track. I pedalled at half track but since it was going pretty good I decided to get back on it again. Ran a 7.55sec @ 185mph and I finally got my burn out sorted. 2nd run was great. Huge smoky burnout saw me get crossed up and gave me a little scare. Rule 1, when your out of control you really have zero control. I was just lucky I didn’t hit the fence. That run I ran a 6.77sec @ 208mph. It felt really good but a little out of my comfort zone, I used half throttle for 75% of the run. The team was stoked and I was surprised it was that quick. They told me 1 more like that and ill get my licence. We got one more run, in the night, and I thought it ran hard. Just after half track the car stepped over to the wall, I got off it straight away and coasted through to a 7.35sec @ 165mph or something like that. There was oil everywhere, it must have got under my tyres. Anyway I was given my license on that final pass. When we got back to the pits we were pretty happy with our achievement and were all in high spirits until we jacked up the car. Oil was leaking out of the sump. I figured someone didn’t do up the sump plug. If only it was that…we broke a rod. We decided it was too much work to fix the engine before the race. There was a fair bit of damage. We spent the weekend as spectators. I’ll take this opportunity to thank the team for all their help, they did a good job.

We are currently now building our second motor and hope to be racing soon.