At 10:38 AM 8/12/02 -0400, you wrote:
>There were 9 Dakotas entered in the Street ET class but
>I only recognized about 3 of them as belonging to DMLers.
>Bob Tom ('97 Dak 318) set some new Mopar Nats performance
>bests with his newly ported heads (by son Dave) and had a
>stellar .525 reaction time in round one to eliminate another friend
>of mine (and tough, regular NTR competitor) in the process.
I want to give huge kudos to my chief mechanic, head pitman, stager,
cook, bottle-washer and, more importantly, son for everything
that I accomplish on the track. After two years of trying to run
a 14.xx on NTR, all his work (especially with the porting stock
heads) finally paid off big time. Out of the 15 runs I made
at this year's Nats, I ran ten 14s, with seven of them in the
14.7s. Driver errors, a lift-off and/or hitting the rev limiter gave
me 15s in the other five runs.
Getting out of the 1st round was my second goal. That .525
reaction time was icing on the cake! I'm sure glad that I had
no idea who that racer was in the Charger :-) By time that I
finish up with my "driver things", I'm approaching the 1/8 mark
and have no idea where my opponent is. It took me awhile to
pick him up as I had expected that he would be right beside me.
If it hadn't been such a hot day, I might have kept on the pedal
but decided just to coast it out.
>Our friend Jim Knox ('91 Dak 318) also set new Mopar Nats
>performance bests with his new Magnaflow muffler outperforming
>his previous open-header times. They eventually went down to
>defeat by uncharacteristic red-lights. The weather had really
>warmed up by Sunday and began to take it's toll on both
>performance and driver concentration!
Red-lights are uncharacteristic for Jim but red-lights and I are
almost becoming siamese twins :-)
The BIG STORY of the Nats goes to Ray Block and deserves
a separate message which will follow shortly !!!
Bob
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