by 3pm we were being called out for our final round of qualifying.. by now we had gone through 3 batteries and 1 jump pack trying to get the car started and we weren’t gonna switch her off and sat in the staging queue for a while, the temps all climbed up over the 190sF and the trans even spiked up to the 180sF but she held together and we lined up with a nice burnout and I left the line with 1000 on the tach

we got out of the box with a 0.199 r/t and ran through the traps on 14.513 @ 96.86 mph.. another 14.5.. the car was spluttering across the line and full noise was a breaking down 4900rpm as opposed to the 5,200rpm we normally cross the line at.. even the shifts from 1 – 2 and 2 – 3 were suffering from a splutter and a lag into the next gear.. but the times were so bloody consistent I started to think about how to dial in for my elimination round.. I spoke to Crew Chief about it and in the end I settled on a 14.48 which would allow for some extra but still keep it close to 14.5 we had been seeing all day..

I checked my pairing and it was another Wainui-ite, Doug in his son’s MK1 Cortina.. his dial in was set at 18.85.. I hate chasing, but knew I was gonna have to with a 4 second difference in dial in times..