We have had a hard time getting the crew together, so we missed two possible dates. We decided to go for Sundsvall with crew members loaned from other racers. Many thanks to Dennis Glanby (PataPers team) and Jonas and The Gang from Gävle. Couldn´t do it without you guys !

Finally we are on a track again. Here is a short report from Sundsvall.

Weather forecasts were really bad, but friday morning arrival at the track we had fair weather, cold but no rain.

Friday was spent setting up in the pits and fixing some small stuff on the car. We did not go for any runs on friday as the full crew was not present until saturday.

Saturday we had two time slots scheduled, one at 12 noon and the second at 4 in the afternoon.

We had the car prepped and after checking the track out, we felt that we could give the track a lot of power....

But we felt we had to be a little bit on the safe side, as we have now changed the cars fuel-system to a Hi/Lo-side system and we did not really know how this would work out.

As it turned out we could have given the car even more power, the track was better than we thought!

Clutch was back to our baseline weight on the arms, but with a little less clearance than we have run before.

This first run was set to be a 1/8m mile run only, because we wanted to see how the new fuel setup behaved, that is without breaking any parts if we had it wrong...

Erik did a nice strong burnout. Staged without any problems and put the fuel to HI, engine sounds very stout now compared to earlier.

The RIMFROST Funny launched very nicely, lifting the front just a short moment and it looked quick and smooth.

We ran the left lane and the car was drifting a bit to the left, not much but Erik had to fight it trying to stay in the groove.

About 330 feet out it looked like he was starting to get it straight but just after that he hit tireshake and was off the throttle at around 400 feet.

We probably should have had some more nitro to burn in the hemi at the point were the clutch locked up. We will change some check-valves before next run.

All in all the run was great for us, as we now know that the baseline clutch / fuel, is getting closer to were we need it. And also the new Hi-Lo system works properly.

We got the best 60-ft time so far...

In the afternoon the track officials decided to start eliminations and extend the racing on saturday due to rain forecasts for sunday. This pushed our second time-slot forward until 7 in the evening.

So there was plenty of time for the service routine in the pits.

As we were hoping everything was fine in the engine, we did not even have to change the rod-bearings. Clutch, oil and fuel plus the “check everything” and we are ready to line up again !

We also tweaked the fuel system a bit to give it more nitro. It wants more nitro, how nice is that ?

When we rolled in the line up area we ended up besides the Leander Bros Top Methanol Funny. Interesting to see our nostalgia funny side by side with their modern carbonfibre body, race car evolution in 30 years.

After some oildown delays, we were given the sign to start the engine at around 8.30 . 

Again a nice strong burnout.

Erik backed up, I took the throttlestop off and shut the hatch, Dennis started guiding Erik into stage but then the starting line fire marshall gave  us the dreaded “kill your engine” sign.

Erik of course killed it. Dennis and I was confused as we could not notice anything wrong and of course immediately felt very frustrated about this.

It turned out that the fire marshall had noticed 3 drops of nitro coming out of the fuel-tank-vent. This is perfectly normal on these cars. There is a lot of fuel returned to the tank during burnout wich can cause an overpressure and also the movements of the car when reversing etc can put a few drops out trough the vent. These few drops are normally just swiped up by the startingline crew, but obviously this guy was not used to nitro cars. Bad luck for us, but of course we appreciate that he was thinking safety.

So what do we do, we are shut down on the starting line, but everybody wants us to run ?  Bit of a problem as we could not start again without rolling back the car. If we roll back the car in the water we need to do a burnout again... hmmm.. we do not have enough fuel for a second burnout... 

Well, we got permission to fill the tank without going back to the pits so I had to run back to get some fuel and soon we were ready to try again.

That was when the rain hit us and saturday racing closed. Saturday rain was nothing compared to the rainstorm on sunday. Very wet we packed up and headed home.

Despite rain we had a very nice time in Sundsvall and hope to be back again soon. Thanks to SHRA Sundsvall, great job, great track.

That was it for this time.

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/ Anders