gallery > Drag Racing 01/19/25

Where'd you race today?

I decided to go drag racing at State Capitol Raceway on Sunday, 01/19/25, during a regular test-&-tune. Cold temps and 25-26mph of gusting head wind all day. A total of (75) racers participated. I arrived at State Capitol Raceway around 10:20am. Density Altitude was around -1430 ft. I breezed through tech since most of the trailered race cars were still getting unloaded.

Times for my (7) passes were as follows: 11:04am, 11:20am, 11:40am, 12:40pm, 1:13pm, 1:30pm, and 1:47pm. My (2) best timeslips are described below and can be found in the attached image. I saved a datalog of each pass with my ECUTEK dongle. While idling in the pits, I kept my eye on turbocharger inlet temperature. If I stayed in the staging lanes for too long with the hood down and engine idling, the turbocharger inlet temperature would creep up from slightly above ambient to as high as 138F. For my sixth pass below, I left the dragstrip and traveled a few miles at highway speed to quickly drop the intercooler temperature down close to ambient.

My best 60ft of the day was only a pitiful 1.954. The cold track temperature was an issue, so I tried to get behind a vehicle with slicks that completed a smokey burnout to lay some rubber down. On some of my passes, the street car or truck in front of me would drive through the waterbox and not doing a burnout. That would bring some water to the starting line. Track workers tried to keep the water away from the starting line, but I could tell quite a few inexperienced folks needed some coaching. I drove around the waterbox in the right lane for each pass. No test launch. No one was in the left lane. Drive up, pre-stage, stage, sportsman tree drop, rev, then launch. Who cares about reaction time if I'm not bracket racing.

You will notice that I didn't use launch control for my runs. I watched a few YouTube videos, but I couldn't get it to work correctly. My tuner had it default to 4000rpm. The videos that I watched showed to click the cruise control "+RES" button up would increase launch control by 200rpm for each click up. That didn't work for me. It stayed at 4000rpm, and any pressing up of the "+RES" cruise control button would only result in a cruise control not available, check the manual error message. After the race, I had Stratified change my default launch control setting to 5000rpm. I will go back later this year to see if my 60ft will improve and times will drop.

I can't say enough good things about the UniClutch Track that I put in my GRC. The clutch held all of the hot lapping without any issues. I could have ran 20 passes that day, but I didn't want to beat on my GRC too much. In the end, another set of wheels with some drag radials would have helped tremendously. Dropping the 60ft would easily net a 12.50 or better.