Tuesday May 3rd evening – Gainesville Raceway

We arrived at Gainesville around 6:30 and unloaded the car and filled out our Drag Race Tech Form and awaited the Tech Inspector.  The inspector looked out car over and made user we signed in all the right places.  Then we gridded the car and walked up to the driver’s meeting.  For the first time we’re seeing the immensity of this place.  They run the NHRA Gator Nationals here and it is huge.  The grandstands are humongous and on both sides.  The large tinning signs at the end of the quarter mile are so big you can easily read them for the starting line.

So Dave ran the Timing Set run and for a 15.1 and a trap speed of 90 mph.  Now it was Greg’s turn, he decide on a bracket time of 14.7 and sure enough earned us a loss so we could get on the road at 8 pm for our hotel in Donaldsonville, LA, some 680 miles away. Basically, if we won our bracket heat, we would have advanced to the next heat AND would have to have stayed there long er and not been able to get on the road. Even as it was we would not get to the hotel until 3:30 am central time. We heard the next day that the bracket racing went on for another hour and a half.  Lucky for us.