2.216VTurbo
10-09-2006, 01:22 AM
I heard Jessie pumping up his figure 8 race team efforts on the radio Friday and I thought it would be cool to check it out in person as I had only ever seen those crazy fools on TV. Kind of got lucky that a local SD club member works for Gale Banks engineering and they just happen to keep a suite at Irwindale raceway:thumb:
When I got there about 7pm Saturday night they were just lining up the mini-stock cars on the track. I don't remember ever seeing so many Pintos in my life! There were like 15+ Pintos, one Toyota Corona, one Datsun AND AN EARLY TURISMO/024/CHARGER :D No supprise that 1st,2nd, and 3rd went to the Ford brand. Of course Chuck and myself are all fired up to build a 70's RWD Colt with a destroked 2l and 16V head:lol: Now if we just had the time and space...
Anyway back to Jesse, his big plan to win the figure 8 race is not to lift, EVER. If you have never seen this type of racing in person, it's something you gotta do at least once, these drivers are INSANE:eyebrows: and entertaining! You could tell that Jesse's car was the highest dollar rig our there, when he gassed it, the thing would jump past any other car that was next to him. Thing was there were at least three cars that would corner better than his car. His car would stay very flat and just slide, the other top three would have some body roll but more stick than him. So Jesse was in the top four for almost the whole race and true to his word he didn't lift at the crossover point until lap 71! He was surley gonna centerpunch another car and no amount of swerving was going to work as it was a line of cars going past. He worked his way to third around lap 110 then second in the last few laps:cheer2: White flag lap he had a real shot at a pass but lap traffic held him back. Still watching him pull down a second place finnish while hanging out in the Banks Engineering suite with Sandra Bullock was a pretty sweet evening:thumb: Well sort of hanging with Sandra, the West Coast Chopper suite was next to Banks and she was maybe 15-20 feet away from me. I swear she looked right at me-once:o
When I got there about 7pm Saturday night they were just lining up the mini-stock cars on the track. I don't remember ever seeing so many Pintos in my life! There were like 15+ Pintos, one Toyota Corona, one Datsun AND AN EARLY TURISMO/024/CHARGER :D No supprise that 1st,2nd, and 3rd went to the Ford brand. Of course Chuck and myself are all fired up to build a 70's RWD Colt with a destroked 2l and 16V head:lol: Now if we just had the time and space...
Anyway back to Jesse, his big plan to win the figure 8 race is not to lift, EVER. If you have never seen this type of racing in person, it's something you gotta do at least once, these drivers are INSANE:eyebrows: and entertaining! You could tell that Jesse's car was the highest dollar rig our there, when he gassed it, the thing would jump past any other car that was next to him. Thing was there were at least three cars that would corner better than his car. His car would stay very flat and just slide, the other top three would have some body roll but more stick than him. So Jesse was in the top four for almost the whole race and true to his word he didn't lift at the crossover point until lap 71! He was surley gonna centerpunch another car and no amount of swerving was going to work as it was a line of cars going past. He worked his way to third around lap 110 then second in the last few laps:cheer2: White flag lap he had a real shot at a pass but lap traffic held him back. Still watching him pull down a second place finnish while hanging out in the Banks Engineering suite with Sandra Bullock was a pretty sweet evening:thumb: Well sort of hanging with Sandra, the West Coast Chopper suite was next to Banks and she was maybe 15-20 feet away from me. I swear she looked right at me-once:o