The Mini show at Santa Pod was a drag for all the right reasons

YOU really needed earplugs to watch the jet car. The sound it made as it screamed past was utterly magnificent, but so loud it was actually painful.

Yesterday I thought I'd do something completely different to get my petrolhead kicks, which is why I jumped in the back of a mate's Saab for the long journey down the M1 to Santa Pod in Northamptonshire. The UK's home of drag racing was having one of its ‘Run What Ya Brung' days for Mini owners, called Mini In The Park.

The event does pretty much what it says on the tin - you pay a couple of quid, line your pride and joy up alongside someone else's pride and joy at the start of a quarter mile dragstrip, and see who gets to the other end first.

Even though I wasn't driving it was a joy to watch, particularly because there was definitely an unofficial element of Mini (the cheeky Brit runaround I've owned a couple of) versus MINI (the BMW-engineered city slicker of today). It was genuinely close stuff in some of the races - yes, the modern motor's got more power as standard, but the older cars came with all sorts of weird and wonderful modifications to make them go even faster. When one new MINI made a blistering start, only to make a large bang and deposit several expensive-looking bits of intercooler along the run, I wasn't sure if I was meant to laugh or cry.

A really quick run in a hotted-up Mini was somewhere between 10 and 15 seconds, but to appreciate the difference between really quick and a proper dragster you just had to see the jet car, a machine which manages to bend time because it's so brutally fast. I simply cannot believe it did a quarter of a mile in less than FIVE seconds, but it did, doing 265mph when it crossed the line! To put it into perspective, that's nought to the top speed of a Bugatti Veyron Super Sport in a quarter of the length of Lord Street in Southport in less than the time it'll have taken you to read this sentence. Surreal stuff.

Even though I'll make sure I bring some earplugs again next time, drag racing's definitely worth the 350 mile round trip. In car nut terms it was like Christmas had come early, only there was a different sort of Santa involved.

Life On Cars took these pictures of the event:

Diesel Powers Challenge, surprising numbers

A 2002 Chev Silverado pulled 1481hp and 2466ft lbs.

but first place at the dragstrip went to a 900 hp Ford
http://www.dieselpowermag.com/2012/diesel_power_challenge/


I

I don't understand why the guys are dynoing diesel trucks indoors with the doors closed. But check out the effing cloud they make!

Don't drag race a junkyard car, you don't know what will break, but this guy found that his bench couldn't take it

found on Hot Rod.com http://blogs.hotrod.com/video-backseat-drag-racing-is-not-recommended-14505.html

A990 superstock Plymouth trivia

 above photo from http://draglist.smugmug.com/Drag-Racing/2010-York-Musclecar-Madness/12886056_HLL43/3/930442314_XDG4d#!i=930442314&k=XDG4d

above photo from http://stores.ultimatediecastmusclecars.com/Detail.bok?no=55

the trivia.. this was one of only 3 A990 known to still exist with a 4 speed, 833 trans

It was the winner of the (Tulsa Oklahoma )World Nationals in 1967.. and was 2 years old. Obsolete by most opinions of drag racers, but beat the factory racers in the newest lightweight cars, with the newest most expensive trick parts. Grumpy Jenkins, Sox and Martin, etc etc etc were not the champs in 1967, it was a couple guys you've never heard of in a 2 year old car that was getting by on pity parts from friends and fans, Like George Hurst who gave them a shifterand line lock, and they won the largest purse to that point for Super Stock  $10,000

Learned about this story in the Oct 2012 Mopar Muscle magazine

carguychronicles.com has a good variety of cool stuff!

 Above, the  2563 cu in Packard - Bentley
Below, the 2807 cu in BMW Brutus
Both were in the Cholmondeley Pageant of Power in Cheshire, UK from June 15 to 17 www.cpop.co.uk
from http://www.carguychronicles.com/2012/03/packard-bentley-2563-cubic-inch-flame.html

this '74 Rolls Royce Silver Shadow is in the 7's http://www.carguychronicles.com/2011/10/rolls-royce-rocket-seven-second-crewes.html

Above, Mean Green Volvo Hybrid beat the Ferrari to the finish line

http://www.carguychronicles.com/2011/09/ferrari-vs-volvo-hybrid-trucker.html

this GT40 mkII with a Holman Moody 427 was ordered by Shelby American, placed 2nd in the 12 hour Sebring in 66, DNF'd at LeMans and was driven by Mark Donohue in both. It then went on the show circuit, before getting stored at Holman Moody until '70 when it went to the Indy Speedway Museum. Effectively, it's been raced hard and put away, without being street driven, ever. http://www.carguychronicles.com/2012/05/ford-gt40-mark-ii-like-new-hardly.html

Baldwin Motion Phase 3 73 Camaro... M22 and Hone OD, with 5.13 gearshttp://www.carguychronicles.com/2012/02/motion-phase-iii-454-camaro-zlx-street.html

Epitome of sleeper, a Biscayne. The Baldwin Motion Street Racer's Special 427 Biscayne to be precise
11 to 1 427, http://www.carguychronicles.com/2011/09/chevy-427-biscayne-street-racers.html

Miss America VIII, and it's twin Harry Miller V16's. Just 1113 cu in apiece. They were supercharged when installed to set unlimited water speed records in 1933. About 1800 hp each.
http://www.carguychronicles.com/2012/01/miss-america-viii-no-substitute-for.html

ain't that a cool variety? Hell yes. http://www.carguychronicles.com

cool and unusual photos from the Oldie But Goodie Tumblr

all from http://theoldiebutgoodie.tumblr.com 

I found a cool new blog with terrific variety of cool stuff I love, thehawkandbuzzard.blogspot.com

wow, what is more 70's... the kids bike, or the fender skirts on the 60's GM midsize

Far out... KISS on choppers! Beats the hell out of that stupid motorbike giveaway they did

Above: Ed Roth's! Awesome! I've never seen it before

Looks like a Roth trike

C'mon, htis is the greatest blog I've found in a while... what a great variety! http://thehawkandbuzzard.blogspot.com

1972 Pro Stocker Herb McCandless racing tricks

Mopar acid dipped the 72 Demon
Holman Moody blew foam behind the panels for stiffness,
nuts, bolts, brackets etc were acid dipped, ground down, cut down or hollowed out
braced everything with reinforcing tubing
hard mounted the engine and four speed front to rear
acid dipped the brake show baking plates,
drilling holes in the rear brake shoes
widened the front end to swap from an A body to an E body k member
altered the steering from front to rear steer

would you believe a guy with a daytime job as a banker set the standard for timing races? Boats, bikes, and drag racing all relied on Otto Crockers timing and clocking ingenuity and perfection

J. Otto Crocker, a San Diego watchmaker, made it possible to accurately time these vehicles to within thousandths of a second for the first time, making new records highly accurate and virtually indisputable. The device consisted of 3 master electronic clock units with individual controls for recording speeds over progressive distances. A photocell beam tripped the clocks at the quarter mile (after the 2 mile start), mile mark 3 & 4, and at the finish line. The Crocker Timer went on to prove its worth at Bonneville, dry lakes, boat racing, and later at the drags.

Born in Neshoba, Mississippi, in 1905, Crocker was exposed early in life to speed and time, as when Barney Oldfield had the 999 racer on display and allowed Crocker to wipe the dust from the car, and when Crocker's grandfather handed him a broken Ingersoll watch and challenged the youth to fix it. Crocker did manage to fix the watch and, intrigued, sent away for the correspondence course offered by the Chicago School of Watchmaking, which he finished in two years.

 He soon became a 13-year-old apprentice watchmaker and shunned formal schooling for the craft. At about the same time, Crocker and his cousins began hopping up Model Ts and racing them on a dirt oval they created. His first car used an airplane engine and Maxwell frame, and a later stripped-down Packard was soon turning 130 mph on Daytona Beach.

In San Diego and out on the dry lakes, he started racing motorcycles, (in the 1920's)  and he soon saw the ineffectiveness of the timing methods, Crocker felt he could do better with a length of rubber hose, a pipe organ diaphragm, a relay, and an electromagnetic stopwatch. When a racer ran over the hose, the bump in air pressure activated the relay and thus the stopwatch.

Crocker also became enamored with speedboat racing while in San Diego, which led him to race Offenhauser-powered Spitfire hulls on the Pacific and on the Salton Sea. So in 1928, he began work on the first of his photoelectric timing systems. Crocker figured that if he ran a beam of light from an automotive headlamp to a photocell, he could electronically trigger a timing mechanism when a boat interrupted the beam of light.  Crocker eventually worked the accuracy of his photoelectric timing system down to .001 second.

 Powerboat racing authorities wasted little time in adopting Crocker's photoelectric timers, but dry lakes racers still used a primitive variation of Crocker's electro-pneumatic timing system, until 1937 when Crocker introduced photoelectric timing to land-speed racing, and the Southern California Timing Association adopted the method in 1939

 A stint in the Army during World War II only served to further his education: The Army assigned him to its Electrical Engineering division and trained him as an instrument maker. Though he continued to time speedboat races long after the war, he followed the post-war explosion of interest in automobile racing first to Bonneville and then into drag racing, developing photoelectric timing systems for each venue.

Perhaps the highest honor possible in Crocker's line of work came in the summer of 1959, when the National Bureau of Standards and the Federation Internationale de l'Automobile officially recognized and adopted Crocker's timing system.

Crocker retired from his day job at San Diego's First National Bank by 1972, but he continued to man the timers at every SCTA event that he could attend until his death

He was also a founding member of the San Diego Roadster Club

All of this info is condensed from the article in Hemmings http://www.hemmings.com/mus/stories/2009/06/01/hmn_feature10.html and the first paragraph and image are from http://www.jalopyjournal.com/?p=5731

a couple intreresting images from FauxReal tumblr (wesbooden.tumblr.com)

all from http://wesbooden.tumblr.com

Miner Threat A/FX 426 wedge