Well here we are. This is Behind The Ropes Part 7: The Final. When the weekend began this was a team that was literally making check out passes to make sure their car was not going to fall apart when they whacked the throttle and here we are in the finals of the event. This is among the most awesome and wild weekends of NHRA Lucas Oil Drag Racing Series action I have seen and this story was a headlining part of it.
I’ll let Corey tell you about it. Watch the video and then head to DragIllustrated.com to read the rest of the blog. This is awesome.
THE FINAL
The final round at this race was a blur. By the time we pulled back into the pits after defeating Alan Bradshaw, Cowie’s guys were already well on their way towards putting a new motor in their car and the NHRA was driving by asking how quickly we could be back up in the lanes. For how new we are as a team, I can’t overemphasize how proud I am of the way the team performed under these circumstances in back-to-back rounds.
Chase Copeland was running around like a mad man tag teaming putting a clutch in the car with me, downloading and analyzing the data from the previous run, and making tuning calls. Kyle, Clay Copeland, and Cory Cox were in unison, meticulously and efficiently servicing the engine. J.P. Gutierrez was lending a hand anywhere possible and my dad and Doug Kotter were floating around taking care of jobs that allowed the rest of the team to focus on the tasks at hand. It was the ultimate team effort.
Despite having little time to make adjustments between rounds, and having no prior data to pull from, we continued to make incremental performance gains throughout the weekend. This was encouraging for our team, but we knew these small performance advancements would need to make a quantum leap forward if we wanted to run with the big dogs in the final round.
