Race Results:
Fire and Thunder
Woodburn Dragstrip
Woodburn, Oregon
June 12-13

This year the Portland/Salem area has seen its fair share of cloudy, rainy, and cool weather for much of 2010. Here it is in the middle of June and we're still in long sleeves barely topping 60 degrees. But at this year's annual Fire and Thunder event at Woodburn Dragstrip the weather was superb. Not a cloud in the blue sky with temp's reaching the 80 degree mark. What could be better than a nice sunny day at the racetrack?

On Saturday, driver Jeff Ashwell and the team did a planned half track pass to try and get some good data for Sunday's race. Even though Jeff short shifted, which basically means shifting before reaching a desired RPM, our incremental numbers still looked good, not where we would like them to be, but definitely good for how warm it was and the 125 degree track temp. After towing back to the pit and looking over things for Sunday the team called it an early night.

Though clouds were to start rolling in by early afternoon the team arrived to the track under sunny skies, just not as warm. The agenda for Sunday was to run at least twice, 3 times if we were to be the fastest funny car on the grounds. On the first run Jeff posted a nice 60' time and went on to click off a 5.84 at 242mph. He had said the pass felt great and that it was real straight and smooth with no tire shake. One of the other funny cars on the premise had run a 5.76 so the team decided to hop it up a bit for the second pass. We might have been a tad bit too aggressive because the car got up on the tires pretty good and smoked and chattered to a 9 second something pass. I had asked Jeff to describe the difference between overpowering the track and tire shake and he said the severe tire shake he felt in Mission, Canada was like being inside a mixing paint can. You can't see a darn thing as your head rattles back and forth blurring your vision leaving you searching for Tylenol. As for overpowering the track he described it as just doing a burnout. It gets up on the tires and goes nowhere. You can sort of see the chatter marks here moving to the left.

We didn't end the day quite as we wanted but still overall it was a good outing for Ashwell Racing. We weren't the quickest funny car that day so that second run was the last. As for now we'll just take the car back to the shop to do a once over as we prepare for the next Lucas Oil Division 6 event at our home track, Woodburn. We had a terrific 2009 at this event and we want to take it one step further by getting our first win light. We have the car, we have the team, we have the confidence and hopefully with a little lady luck on our side we'll get just that. We'll just have to wait and see what happens June 25-27th.