The annual Show and Go race weekend is over, and nothing serious broke on my car or any others in our group. The only vehicle that couldn’t make it home was my mom’s mini-van – all the drag race vehicles made it back safely (though as I will tell you, getting my truck home was no easy task).
This year the event was four days rather than the usual three, so we were able to get many more quarter-mile-runs in compared to years past. Basically, the event consists of somewhere around 500 drag race vehicles in various classes racing to the end of the quarter mile head to head. There were a few dragsters and funny car class rides, but a bulk of the racers are people like me, racers that have a car that they want to tune up and see what it can do – though most are much, much more serious about it than myself. One did actually break 200 Mph in the quarter mile. That’s die if you crash kind of speed.
My truck was running slower times than I’d gone in the past so I was a little grumpy, but my luck in the elimination rounds on the fourth day made up for it. Strip Eliminator 2 (SE/2) is the largest class at the event with anywhere from 40 to 100 participants typically, and that’s the class I was in. It’s single elimination so it narrows the field quickly. This year, I made it to the finals! I was (and still am) pumped. Most years we make it one or two rounds and then lose, but I just kept winning. I ended up losing the final race by 0.008 seconds, or less than 1.3 feet traveling at 100 Mph. This year the number of cars in SE/2 class were a little lower than normal, only 43, but I’ll take second out of 43 any day. Racing was all done, time to pack up and head home.
The trouble with having the race on the 4th of July is that everyone and there brother goes “up north” for the holiday. Filling the lakes area with what seems like millions of people makes for a miserable commute back to St. Cloud on Sunday. The truck is fine as a daily driver most of the time, but with stop and go traffic for hours on end it has a tendency overheat. Normally I’d just pull over and what for it to cool down, and then join the stop and go traffic for a while until it overheats again, (repeat for hours) but I had a problem with my starter. It had a loose wire so every time I turned it off, I had to have someone jiggle (sorry for the technical race lingo) the wire until it started – problem, I was alone and would be jiggling for hours. I tried twice to make it through the stop and go traffic, hoping it was only for a few miles, but had to turn back because it was overheating. I hit stop and go about 7 miles south of Brainerd, it’s 60 miles to St. Cloud, so I had to head back and find a different route. Giving up on 371 to Little Falls I tried to head to Pierz on 25 and then cut over to Little Falls where 371 is a 4 lane, and most likely not stop and go. Everything was going great until it started to rain, hard. I didn’t have any windshield wipers so I basically followed the red lights in front of me. (at least it wasn’t overheating) Rain is not fun with balding tires and too much horse power when you can’t see where you’re going. Did I mention it was dusk? Oh, and one of my blinkers wasn’t quite working either. Yeah. But I made it home in just under 3.5 hours, it normally takes under an hour, but I made it.
