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Now there has been a jump in time...
mostly because there has been too much time spent in the garage,
and too little time in front of the computer.
Pictures and results from previous events will follow later on,
but now I had to get this up ASAP.
At TXM Cup 4 I could feel things were heading in the right direction,
and at Lazzat Strip Challenge 201m the 22:th August I got gold in front tech.
That was exactly the kind of receipt I needed to know for sure that the car was really running well.
From that date I had seven days to get the M/T slicks fitted.
I bought the slicks early spring 2002, but I didn't bother to get them fitted,
until the engine was running properly.
The other reason was simply due to the difficulty to find steel/aloy-wheels in the dimension 13x8"
With only seven days left, I got in contact with a company that could make my standard 5"-wheels 8" wide.
At first they couldn't do it in less than a month,
but after explaning that I needed the wheels in less than a week or not at all,
they did the job both fast and well.
Thanks for that Intera Sverige!
I picked up the wheels at Thursday afternoon and I even got the tyres fitted to the wheels.
As I was trying to get the wheels fitted to the car thursday evening,
I realized the car needed some minor body modifications to fit the new larger wheels.
First we tried with just bending the edge of the fender out a little bit,
but that was far from enough.
Instead we just sliced the edge up and put some gafer-tape so that no one would get hurt by just looking at the edge.
Maby not the most delicate way, but very well working.
Friday night finally it was time for some test runs with the new rubber,
We went to the nearest industrial park, pored out some water and tryed to lock the car up,
but it didn't matter how hard I tryed. The car just went off like it was race day.
After a couple of tests, one of the tyres went flat, due to a razor knife.
I brought the M/T:s to the competition anyway,
maybe I could find someone there that could fix the flat tyre...
To start with I ran on the Yokahama Advan 032R that I got last year.
With crazy wheel-spin all second gear I run two 13,64 - 171 in a row,
the first with 1,2 bar boost and the second with 1,6 bar.
After those two runs this man came by...
He is very famous in Sweden and is involved in most of the fastest cars in Sweden.
He helped my out with the flat tyre.
With 1,2 bar pressure in the tyres I easily ran 13,10 - 173.
And that was with a 60ft at 2,27s.
In the second try with the fat rubber I got nervous, missed completely and ended up with 13,59 - 176.
After that run it started raining and by that the day was over.
Saturday was just qualifying day, and Sunday was the real race day.
It was now or never ,
this was the last chance this year to run 1/4 mile.
I had earlier during a massive intake of beer calculated that I would be able to run 12,86
but I never told anyone since it was probably a bit faster than anyone would believe...
My first race on the Sunday felt alright,
I won by pretty much, I got a pretty good start,
I rev ed to 7000 prm at every gear, the lambda-meeter told me to stop,
but there just was no room for anything else but full throttle.
This was going to be fast. Really fast.
Before I even got on to the return lane,
the mobile started to ring like crazy.
The first to congratulate me was Jompa that had fixed the tyres the day before.
12,50s - 180km/h
I had to ask him several times to believe it.
Second race was a solo for me.
The tyres got a really unpleasant grip right after burning in the water in the first round,
so instead of destroying the gearbox and axels in a solo,
I just took the car from start to goal in the safest way possible.
Some photographers got a bit annoyed when I didn't run a mid 12 again,
but to run mid 12's with original gearbox and axles from a car with 105 bhp
will result in broken parts sooner or later.
I have been calculating on that all the time, and I don't expect the gearbox to hold on much longer,
I have four extra gearboxes prepared just for that reason.
The third race was against a Volvo V40 with NOS.
Now I pushed the time down to 12,49s - 180km/h!
I was a bit slow in reaction, thereby the Volvo won with his slower time.
Even if he was the first to cross the finnish line,
I really felt like a winner.
Since I had participated in every TXM Cup event during 2002 ,
I got 200 bonus points, which gave me the 5:th place in total.
Not bad at all when considering that I lost directly the three first races.
See the totals from TXM Cup 2002
After the race an article was published in Bilsport 21-2002.
The Wok got a small part in it:
2002-09-01
