The 4 Link Ugly Stick.

I feel I have to start by saying I didn't name the Ugly Stick, and I don't think she is ugly. This is what has been eating our time over the weekend, and in fact last weekend as well. This is Tet's drive for the year. A Super Pro ET - Super Comp Dragster.


This is the latest addition to the Paul Marston Race School. Seen in front of the soon to be gone barn. She has just been brought over from America and seems to be taking to her new surroundings pretty well. Of course having behaved well in testing she then proceeded to have a strop the first real race. Friday morning she started blowing fuses. It turned out that her throttle stop had shorted out. This was bad news, not only had it missed us the first round of qualifying but it meant that Super Comp was going to become a lot harder. The class requires you to cover the standing quarter in 8.90 seconds, this car can easily do it in 8.20, so is too fast without her stop. Still in the old days it was done by lifting and this was Tet's chance to show he could do it that way too.

After finding and elimination this fault we headed back out for the second round, and got shut down on the line. We had a water leak. Not in an easy to get to place either. one of those simply remove the engine to fix, sort of leaks. Still we managed to get it done by the end of the day and the starter kindly allowed Tet to make his last licencing pass at the end of racing. The parachute does work and he knows how to deploy it.

Above is the early morning burn out , from Saturday. As you can see the weather was perfect for racing, we didn't get a spot of rain all weekend. I love the look of the burnout with this car. You can see the smoke slowly curling off the tyres. By the end of the weekend Tet had also found the optimum length of burnout to put the most heat in the tyres. We were thrilled when Tet made it through the first round of eliminations in Super Pro, and unsurprised that he didn't in Super Comp. However the Super Comp race was fantastically close, not bad for doing things the hard way.

This was one of those moments when you get bored standing in the pairing lanes. The car herself is very bright and shiny but the helmet was giving a perfect reflection of the lane. Again you can see the wonderfully blue sky, so different to last year. I think there will be a quilt inspired by this picture, and a during the weekend I came up with several other ideas too. I think having multiple diverse hobbies is really useful for keeping ideas flowing for quilts.

There are more race reports here;

Drivers perspective by Tet
Crew Chiefs Perspective by Robin
EuroDragster - look for 12.00