Ok Gang, here's our recap of the Northwest Bug Run at the Woodburn, Oregon drag strip:
We left Redding on Thursday night, got to Grants Pass and spent the night there. Then we got up early and made it to Woodburn by noonish. Thank God there were hardly any cars in the parking lot at our hotel! Driving a 45’ trailer through a hotel lot is nerve racking. Soo.... we decided to drop the trailer off at the track that night. We got to the track and were greeted with open arms. Met with Duane and the track owner, J. They secured us a very nice pit area and assured me that they would spray VHT before we ran (We heard they even sprayed a little extra just for us, talk about service!).
On Saturday we got to the track at 7am. We got the car ready to fire, and at 9am a good friend, Gary Eichman, showed up to help (Gary is the crew chief on a nostalgia top fuel funny car). We fired the car up, synced the injectors, and got ready to run. The first pass, did the burn out, and Steve got a face full of what he thought was water and sand. On top of that, a couple rocks from the burnout came down and cracked the wind screen. We got the car staged, took off, stayed on all 4 cylinders throughout the run. We ran a 7.49 at 175mph (our fastest time there). We got back to the pits to do the regular maintenance, and noticed the main fuel line that sits on top of the block was loose, so it wasn’t water that got in Steve’s eyes, it was Nitro! With that loose line, we learned that taking away fuel on the top end kept it on all 4 holes! But being that we had a leak, we couldn’t trust the data, so we put the car back out just like it was, but without the fuel leak. On the second run, we had no problems on the burnout, staged the car, but the record button for the data did not get pushed. Took off in 1st gear and we dropped a hole, shifted to 2nd, and that hole came back. We got out a ways, then dropped the hole again. When we got it back to the pits, we talked about what to do, and decided to change up our mixture a bit. We took it out for the third and final time, but the outside air was not as good as the morning air, and we ran a 7.50 at 175mph with all 4 cylinders good to go.
We walked away learning something and are now talking about how to get more out of the engine, instead of talking about what we’re going to do about dropping cylinders. Gary Eichman was a huge help, our crew chief Ralph Masala worked his ass off, and a very special thanks to Ron Pratt who drove all the way up and back towing us, plus his input is priceless.
The track was absolutely fantastic, by far the best little track we’ve ever ran at. The staff was gracious, the tracks surface was fantastic, and we would highly recommend attending an event or racing there. The Rose City Volksters and the Bug Run coordinators were fantastic, we got many thanks for being there, which made it all worth while to us. Needless to say, we were highly impressed. The ONLY negative was... it’s too far away! 10 hours with a trailer for us! Woodburn will definitely be seeing Wolfgang again in the future!