Yes, Doug Tjapkes (easy to pronounce; the "T" is silent and everything else sounds like you'd expect: ***-kess) blew his R2 Hawk on his seventh run.[xx(] (I thought 7 was a lucky number?) He had been tickling the 14s, too; getting as low as 15.026 early Saturday morning.
They pulled his Hawk onto the trailer at the far end of the track and left without coming back to the pits for a post-mortem, so we don't know for sure what happened. It did blow big-time: camshaft, rod, bearing, and piston parts out through the oil pan and all over the track.
Ouch!
On a happier note
, Ted and The Plain Brown Wrapper posted a new low ET for their performance at that event: 12.848 at 111.11 MPH! So did The Tomato: 108.27 MPH, while matching Ted's previous low ET with the Tomato up there: 13.301.
The BIG "improver" and the star of the show, in perspective, was Richard Poe and his 1963 R1/4-speed Lark Custom 2-door.
He astonished everyone with a 14.354 ET right out of the box (first run) late Friday afternoon. He came back shaking, "Geeze, how could I ever do that good again?" (Remember, it was just last September that Richard finally broke into the 14s after years of trying.)
Well, Richard came back Saturday morning and posted a 14.278, and then, two runs later, a 14.353!!!! All of Richard's terminal speeds were between 94.57 - 96.56 MPH; very consistent.
While doing "all the above," Richard beat the following cars in heads-up drag racing: 1969 Hurst Olds 455, 1963 Corvette Fuel Injection, 1971 Mustang SCJ429, and a 1969 Rambler Scrambler...and remember, Richard's car is an unsupercharged R1!!
(In fairness to those competitors, Richard beat some of them on Reaction Time; they turned lower ETs, but he had a better reaction time and got to the end of the quarter-mile sooner, so he won fair-and-square even though he had a higher ET. It's not the lowest ET that wins a drag race; it's the car that gets to the end of the quarter-mile first after the lights go green!) [}]
We had seven Studebakers running: The Tomato, The Plain Brown Wrapper, Peter Sant's R2 Avanti, Chuck Kern's R2 Avanti, John Raab's mostly R1 1963 Lark Regal 2-door, Richard Poe's 1963 Lark Custom R1 2-door, and Doug Tjapkes' 1963 R2 Super Hawk. Everyone except Doug had a great time and most posted a new record for their car one way or another...that is, once the rain stopped mid-afternoon Friday [
] and they could get the track dried off for a couple hours' running on what should have been an 8-hour practice day.
More later in Turning Wheels. BP
BP
They pulled his Hawk onto the trailer at the far end of the track and left without coming back to the pits for a post-mortem, so we don't know for sure what happened. It did blow big-time: camshaft, rod, bearing, and piston parts out through the oil pan and all over the track.
Ouch!On a happier note
, Ted and The Plain Brown Wrapper posted a new low ET for their performance at that event: 12.848 at 111.11 MPH! So did The Tomato: 108.27 MPH, while matching Ted's previous low ET with the Tomato up there: 13.301.The BIG "improver" and the star of the show, in perspective, was Richard Poe and his 1963 R1/4-speed Lark Custom 2-door.
He astonished everyone with a 14.354 ET right out of the box (first run) late Friday afternoon. He came back shaking, "Geeze, how could I ever do that good again?" (Remember, it was just last September that Richard finally broke into the 14s after years of trying.)Well, Richard came back Saturday morning and posted a 14.278, and then, two runs later, a 14.353!!!! All of Richard's terminal speeds were between 94.57 - 96.56 MPH; very consistent.
While doing "all the above," Richard beat the following cars in heads-up drag racing: 1969 Hurst Olds 455, 1963 Corvette Fuel Injection, 1971 Mustang SCJ429, and a 1969 Rambler Scrambler...and remember, Richard's car is an unsupercharged R1!!
(In fairness to those competitors, Richard beat some of them on Reaction Time; they turned lower ETs, but he had a better reaction time and got to the end of the quarter-mile sooner, so he won fair-and-square even though he had a higher ET. It's not the lowest ET that wins a drag race; it's the car that gets to the end of the quarter-mile first after the lights go green!) [}]We had seven Studebakers running: The Tomato, The Plain Brown Wrapper, Peter Sant's R2 Avanti, Chuck Kern's R2 Avanti, John Raab's mostly R1 1963 Lark Regal 2-door, Richard Poe's 1963 Lark Custom R1 2-door, and Doug Tjapkes' 1963 R2 Super Hawk. Everyone except Doug had a great time and most posted a new record for their car one way or another...that is, once the rain
stopped mid-afternoon Friday [] and they could get the track dried off for a couple hours' running on what should have been an 8-hour practice day.More later in Turning Wheels. BP
BP
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