Take it from
someone who knows, when the extended weather forecast says rain
in Seattle - bank on it. But drag racers have always been an
optimistic lot and just the words, "a chance of clearing"
is enough encouragement to travel thousands of miles and spend
tons of money to sit in the rain for three days. Some would say
booking a race at Pacific Raceways in May is a crap shoot at
best. The locals could only say, "What were they thinking?"
They also said, "You should have been here last weekend...
it was beautiful". Go figure.
Be that as it
may, 12 Top Fuel teams and 5 Funny Car teams (and about 100 other
race cars in various classes) made the trek to the great northwest
hoping to compete during the biggest motorsports weekend of the
year. In the end most of us ended up watching the Indy 500, the
NASCAR Coca-Cola 600 and NHRA at Topeka at places like the Competition
Grill on Sunday. Like the March Meet, it wasn't anybody's fault
- the track was excellent, the air was great but ya can't race
in the rain. Through no fault of their own, this may have been
the straw that broke the Goodguys back when it comes to their
VRA drag racing program. Rumors were/are ramped however the Goodguys
have made no statement confirming or denying them.
Conjecture aside,
drag racers did what they do well and made the best of a bad
situation. On Friday everyone was a bit hopeful that a run or
two could happen but every time the rain would stop and the track
crew got to work drying, it would come down again. Twice they
actually told the Hot Rod and fuel cars to get ready to run but
Mother Nature had other ideas. So the day was punctuated with
warm-ups surrounded by lots of bench racing, gags and games.
The weather report
for Saturday was suppose to be better and Sunday clearing. Wrong.
It got worse on day two and only three cars even came out of
their boxes. The playful mood of Friday was a bit more subdued
and by the afternoon only a fool was thinking this deal was going
to have a happy ending. In an act they didn't even believe, the
staff actually set up the race ladders for Sunday off of points
- a race without one car having gone down the track... qualifying,
we don't need no stinking qualifying. In their defense, with
a total car count of about 120 it was doable if racing could
have started early - really early. We'll never know as we were
stuck in a bad remake of Groundhog Day. The event was called
at 8:30 AM Sunday.
All that crap
said, we did snap some pit photos and I'm going on the premise
that those are better than nothing. So here are a hodge podge
of candid shots from Friday and a few from Saturday in no particular
order and with no rhyme or reason. Sorry we can't translate all
the laughs with the images.
Contributing
photogs: Dan Kaplan, Jim Sorenson, Don Ewald and Walt Stevens.
This was a common sight Friday morning.
Often
photos speak for themselves.
