Summer has well and truly arrived!

That can only mean one thing, and its time to make our way to the Summer Nationals at Santa Pod. The weather was looking good, even if it was going to be a little bit too hot for a comfortable time in the fire suit! Experience at the last few events had shown that the Belle was running a bit fat (rich fuel mixture for those non-draggers out there). The hot summer days would only make this worse, so Chief Spanner Monkey set about spending Friday evening changing the carb jets. Oh these guys know how to have a good time! After the fuel changes were made, we settled down and "fuelled" ourselves with the odd beverage.... or two.... or three...

Team "Antisocial" by name....

Our first pass headed straight and true and the Belle ran a season best 9.66 against our 9.60 dial-in. It looked like the changes to fuelling had done the trick and we were managing to get all the power down to the track too. Luckily we had the on-board camera ready to go and you can ride with the Belle from ignition to past the  finish line (2mins 25secs), by following one of the links below:

On board Med Res (15Mb)

On board Low Res (7Mb)

The crew and their new pet, "Cedric" the camel.

Out with the spanners...

Meet Cedric... cute, but not the kind of animal you want to get on the wrong side of. And that camouflage is uncanny!....

Saturday was lined up for three qualifying passes and the day ran very smoothly, with the Wild Bunch making the three passes at about 11am, 1pm and 5pm.

Team Twisted had a stand in crew member for the day as Dean's colleague Steve pitched in. We soon got him working as we checked over a few odds and ends while waiting for the first qualifying session; and checked the spark plugs between runs.

Steve and Dean checkout the spark plugs.

Read what happened on Sunday......

Our good friend Sharkman had brought a surprise along with him. Pooky and Penny were lucky enough to receive a present of a pet Camel, all the way from sunny Bahrain! Well, as you can imagine, Cedric was quickly named and joined the family, although his disposition has yet to be fully qualified.. just look at that pout... and you all know what Camels are famous for...

We blame Sharky for leaving him in a suitcase for 6 months... 

She looks so pretty in the sunlight..

For the second qualifying round we ran a slower 9.81, largely due to the increase in heat as the day had become very hot and humid. The third and final qualifying pass ran a slightly higher 9.86, but we were happy with the performance through the day.

We settled down for a relaxing evening and after spotting a drop of oil, Dean wiped the belly pan to remove any fluids that may have been caught. To our dismay, there was quite a lot of transmission fluid that had collected after the last run. We removed the body for closer inspection and found that the transmission fluid cooler had split and was dripping over the case and onto the pan. Without a spare cooler with us, we decided to remove the cooler and just run a bypass line. We'd need to keep an eye on the fluid temperature but with any luck we'd get through the rest of the weekend.....