In Behind The Ropes part three you are going to get a little taste of triumph as the Michalek Brothers Racing team, on their last possible opportunity to qualify manage to do just that and make the field of 16 for eliminations at their first race in their own equipment. This is a truly big moment. Listen, any category that has a bump spot creates my favorite moment of the weekend at ANY drag race and that’s final qualifying. Perform or die, that’s what it is and these guys were feeling every inch of that pressure.
We have an excerpt of the blog and the whole video below. You can click the link to read the whole blog on DragIllustrated.com. This story only gets better from here, kids. Stay tuned!
IN THE SHOW
An all or nothing run on Saturday morning, in the left lane, against a blown car, in Charlotte to try and qualify for the show…we’ve seen this one before.
We fully expected it to be a tall order learning how to run a nitro car on our own, and that’s why we teamed up with some of the best in the business with Clay and Chase Copeland. Kyle has touched on it multiple times in his previous blog posts, but we’re not that naive to think we were just going to buy this thing turnkey (turnkey – yeah, right…), roll it up to the line, and see what it could do. We knew that there was a massive learning curve ahead of us, and it was important that we partnered with the right people like the Copelands and our other crew member, Cory Cox, to minimize the amount of hiccups along the way.
One of the things that Kyle and I laughed about after everything was all said and done for the weekend is the fact that we currently SUCK at mixing fuel…and by we, I mainly mean me. We’re still new to the process and we’ll figure out the tricks along the way, but it takes me probably 5x longer than every other guy in the pits to prepare our fuel jugs at the beginning of the day.
We also still have serious nerves when it comes to making sure our nitro percentage isn’t too high. As you can see in the video before Q3, Kyle is dumping a small bottle of alcohol into the fuel tank with one pair remaining before our run. To this point, we have consistently brought the percentage down way too far. Of the 6 runs that we went to the scales in Charlotte, 2 of the runs were under 94% and 3 of them were under 94.5%. To say that we left some performance on the table there would be an understatement….
