First off, I would like to thank Cartek for hosting this event. I would like to thank Tlewis and his family for helping to arrange the track, and I would like to thank Tommy (3Gun) for allowing me the oppportunity to drive his car. In addition, I would like to thank LG for his hard work in giving us a strong car to drive.

I would like to say how much fun we all had at this event. It was so nice to meet so many folks from the Corvette community. It was nice to be able to put names to faces. I could try to name them all, but I would miss some.

My hope is that if I share with folks what happened, they can see both sides of this. From this, you can draw your own conclusions.

First thing this morning, we took a ride with Tlewis around the track on his golfcart. We looked over the return roads, and went by the scale. Part of decking on the scale had broken, and they were attempting to repair it so we could use it. The scale is an old style balance scale with a strain gauge. ONe of the guys from the track told us that the scale had quite a bit of variance in it, and that you needed to zero the scale after every car, or the weight could vary wildly as the zero balance of the scale moved.

So, after that, I went to scale the car. Brent was behind me. The digital readout faces away from the driver. So, I asked Brent to check my weight. The car showed to be 3175. I then checked Brent's car for him, and he was at 3260. I went to our pit area, and loaded some ballast into the car. This time, I took JW02 with me. JW stood outside the car, zeroed the scale, and I scaled the car. We set the ballast of the car at ~ 3270.

I then drove the car over to our pit and waited for the event to commence. The weather was not working in our favor. DA was on its way up, so I figured that I better go cut a number right off the bat. So, as soon as the lanes were open, I made a pass.

I came to the scale, and there was a line of cars, around 4 or 5. Two of the fellows from Cartek were running the scale. When my car scaled, they said you're light, the car shows to be 3200 lbs. I told the guy, that can't be right, I just cheked my weight 5 or 10 minutes ago, and weighed 3270. I told him that I didn't want to have an issue with the weight, and that the scale had to be wrong. He said to me that the scale was not reading very accurately, and said flat out he thought the scale was a pile of junk. He told me to go make another pass, and he'd rescale the car. If it read correctly, then he wouldn't worry about the weight. So, I went back through, made another pass. On the first pass, they lined me up on the scale. On the second time before I pulled on the scale I made them zero the scale, then I spotted myself on the scale. All of the sudden my weight jumped to 3280. But, on this pass, somehow my timeslip was some how lost. No one seemed to be able to find it, , and I was directed to go to the timing stand to get a new one. Now, what happened in the 5 feet between the slip printer and my car, I have no idea. But, I don't have that run. So, I have no idea what he car ran on my 2nd pass.

On my 3rd pass the car went a 10.73, and the car still weighed 3280. At the end of the day, my car was about 3265 from the fuel I burned.

Later in the heat of the afternoon, I happend to get to the lines about the same time as Brent. I asked him if he wanted to run, and he said no not really, he was still doing some testing. So, I said Ok. The lanes guys had different ideas,and paired us up for a pass. Brent got staged, and right as I got into the beams, they dropped the lights. This was on a .400 Pro tree. I was still getting my revs up. Brent holeshotted me badlyprobably 4 lengths or so. On top of that I just blew the launch. That was our only side by side encounter, and Brent won that

Here are those results:
Me / Brent
60 -1.535 / 1.527
330 - 4.562 / 4.498
1/8 7.053 / 6.961
mph 99.49 / 100.16
1/4 10.995 / 10.844
mph 123.39 /127.24

It wasn't our "grudge match". But, it is the only side by side info I have.

Anyhow, as the day progressed I watched Brent who is just a driving machine make what seemed like 30 passes. That may be an exageration, but not by much. Brent just kept working on launch rpm, tire pressure, you name it. I have to give him big props, he really kept at it during the day.

Anyhow, at the end of the day there was soem mention of having the top two racers from each class have a run off, or something. Anyhow, I began to get the idea that Cartek was now not going to allow that pass to stand as they felt I was underweight. I finally discussed this, along with what the plans were for the rest of the day, as if we were finished we were going to pack up and leave. Dave told us that they were going to sort out who ran what, and set up some runs between #1 and #2. This dragged on from 2 PM til almost 3:30. After that, Cartek sent someone down to say they wanted Brent to race me 3 times heads up. Tommy told me to go find out what they wantged to do. His instructions to me were that if Cartek would allow our runs to stand he'd be willing to run Brent heads up 3 times for fun. I talked with Julio and Dave, and they basically said that the car was too light, and the run wasn't going to stand. They then told me that Brent's best time of 10.71 was not going to stand as he was too light on that pass. Aside from my "mystery pass" my best pass was a 10.735. Brent told me his next best pass was a 10.730.

Julio and Daves idea was just to run the cars heads up 3 times, and discount all the runs from the entire day as the scale could no longer be trusted. So, the entire day to that point was a wash. Tommy was adamant about the fact that we won, and if they announced us as the winner of the class we'd run heads up. Cartek's postion was that this was unacceptable to them. By this time it was just after 4PM, and the event was now supposed to be over. It was decided that we would just load up and head back to Texas, as we have a rather long drive ahead of us. We loaded the car up 4:30 and left the track.

For the record, I didn't go pull 100lbs out of the car, right before my pass, after just adding weight to get legal for the class. Cartek said that if you either didn't weigh the car, or you didn't weigh enough, they were not going to give you your slip. I have my slip, they gave it to me, so my understanding was all along that the run counted.

Quite simply as the day went on DA went from +385 to +1400. The track got hot and greasy. All the best passes were made in the morning. We hoped to be able to run at 9am, but things didn't get started till 11am. We knew we had a good pass, and we didn't beat on the car trying to go faster as it looked to be pointless trying to do so.

Again. I have no hard feeling towards anyone at Cartek. I understand their posistion, and I hope they can understand ours. The rules were just sort of changed on the fly as we went. I don't think there was any mailcious intent here, they were just changed. Some folks were ok with this, and some folkks were not. For instance. It was supposed to be a best of 5 runs. Because of car count, you ran as often as you wanted. Some folks had some issues with this. Some looked at it as an opportunity to make a bunch of passses.


At the end of the day when Tommy and Julio were talking Tommy told Julio that if he would announce us as the winners, we'd run Brent. Julio asked Tommy waht made him think we were the winners. Tommy's reply was that we had posted the best time. Julio said that time didn't necessarily dictate the winner, and he would determine who the winner is.

I don't think this was some grand conspiracy to defraud us of a win. I think the rahter loose rules, and some of the misunderstandings simply made a for a bad situation. Throughout the last two days I spoke to folks from Cartek, Vette Doctors, LPE, and various forum members. Everyone was polite. Everyone was civil to one another. In short, I think we were all getting along and having a good time with one another.

I just want folks to know I am neither a cheat nor a liar. The car did what it did. It weighed what it did. Folks are free to make their own decisions. I know there will probably be folks on both sides of this who wiul haver valid points. I'm sure if you look at it, you can see both side. I would just hope that we can all get along, no one gets banned, and at the end of the day we can agree both shops built some fast cars.

Take care,
J-Rod

J-rod, it was great to finally see you line up with Brent and meet you.

When you ran the 10.67 your car weighed in at 3,200 pounds, that’s under the 3,250 weight limit and the run had to be disqualified. I’m not saying that you guys were cheatings, but immediately after that run when you finally weighed in over 3,250 your car started to run 1-2 tenths and 2-3 mph slower than Brent through out the day. I will post all the runs during the event (same day) between you and Brent when I return home.
If I just ran my quickest ET and the scales display shows that I'm under the legal limit, I would contest the scale right there or at the very least get off the scales to make sure that it’s zeroed and get back on again.

The scales were fine, Dave even told you that in the 6-7 runs he did through out the day his car was within 5 pounds in all the runs. The “Grudge match” was Mike’s idea to accommodate the owner of the car you were running since he threatened that if we didn’t announce his car as the winner of the head/cam class based on the 10.67 @ 3,200 pounds run that he would pack up and leave. Brent, Dave and I agreed to a grudge match, but the owner of the car you were running didn’t want any part of it.


Julio