Hello from Hilo Dragway in beautiful Hawaii…
It just so happened that I just happened to be on the Hilo side of the Big Island Hawaii on a night where Hilo Dragway just happened to be racing. Coincidence? Anyways while everyone back home was @ Summit Motorsports Park, shivering with 50 degree temps, my girlfriend & I were pulling in the gates of Hilo Dragway. Hilo just happens to be located in one of the raniest places on earth by getting 126.72″ of rain a year. The propper name for the drag strip is Pana‘ewa Drag Strip. the locals like to call it Pana‘ewa rain forest. Not the smartest place in the world to build a dragstrip. BUT!!! we lucked out! It was a beautiful day for racing. 80 degrees & sunny.
We pulled in the gate & were asked if we wanted to race. We would have if we gad more time but only had an hour or so before we had to head North for dinner & a friends house. A rental car is the best race car of all. LOL We opted to just go in take some pictures & talk to the locals. What a night & day difference from home. SMP gets about 500 cars on a Saturday night. This place got 3 cars entered in their points program for the night. There were probably 25 cars there for test & tune & maybe a gamblers race with cash put up by the racers as a purse. The one big problem is that the track is owned by the county parks & is rented out to car clubs for racing. The other bigger problem is there are 2 conflicting car clubs that pull members from one another. If they were combined the car count would be worth noting but the club owners do not see eye to eye.
It doesn’t matter where in the world the race track may be, things are the same all over. Good times spent with family & friends, stories being told, & competition on the track. We met some cool people with some pretty cool rides. Definitely a lasting impression was left.
Better late then never some say! Being only a week behind this time of year is not bad at all for us. Lets jump back a week to the start of the season at Summit Motorsports Park, The first outing for us in the 2013 season.
Things overall went really smooth usually after working all winter long on my car it seems like there are always a few loose strings. Luckily enough that wasn’t the case this year and it was pick up right were I had left off. Saturday night @ Summit Motorsports Park I ended up making it down to 15 cars losing 4th round at 2:30am Sunday morning!
Amanda did rather well for the first time out in something that she has never ran before. She wound up losing in the second round to a well seasoned racer who has a quarter mile long list of accomplishments of his own. The Concord has fully exceeded all expectations I had for it. It has turned into a nice, low 13 second, fully functional street car, that we can drive back and forth to the local tracks to minimize the expense of having two tow vehicles and trailers.
Steve ended up losing in the second round of competition to end our first outing at Summit Motorsports Park for the year.
Week two and we are back at it just like that. Saturday was the second points race of the year at SMP. As for me & Steve we don’t have much to talk about. Unfortunately we both red lighted our chances away first round for a very short night. On the other hand Amanda was going off in the sportsman class.
After making her two time trail passes we opted to make a not so conventional change to her system. She decided she wanted to “Deep Stage” first round in an effort to pick up her slower (but consistent) reaction times. So deep staging is a process of staging deeper to move yourself closer to the starting line to help pick up your reaction time with a slower reacting vehicle. She handled it really well and the change showed greatly in her reaction times for the rest of the night before she lost to yet another veteran racer. It what was an awesome race. She was .008 to his .019 on the tree and the margin of victory was .0002 not in her favor. All things considered not a bad outing for the Concord.
Sunday we are at Dragway 42 for out first points race of the year. Its Amanda and myself flying solo for the day as Steve opts to stay back and not go out for the day.
We get there in enough time to make one time trial each. We both make decent runs and are ready to go at it. Amanda lucks out and get pulled for the first round bye and gets the luck of making a single run for the first round win. She ended her day a little short by turning on the red light in the second round. I somehow managed my way through the majority of the field before I fell short in the semi finals when I miss chose a dial in and was pretty much just along for the ride at that point. But still a healthy start for the year there.
The first two weeks out had some ups and downs but overall we are happy with how everything has worked with all the cars and we just have to focus on blowing off the winter cob webs. This weekend brings us back to SMP for the third points race of the year and Sunday off for mothers day. Steve has the weekend off for some R&R in Hawaii. There may just be a weekend update from Hilo Dragway????
