As some of you may know, The Nostalgia Nationals is one of those events. You know, one of THOSE events.

Organised by the NSRA it's a real Hot Rod lifestyle event and only allows pre-1972 vehicles to enter the weekends drag strip action. It's hugely popular and is a fantastic place to feast your eyes on a whole range of classic English tin, Yank muscle cars, customs, Street Rods and following the global trend, this year also featured an array of rat rods. In the past, all of this action has meant that the dragstip has been very busy and there was a lot of waiting in queues......

But not this year.......!!!

Wooooo hooooo !!!! Cheers for the photo's Sharky.

Back in the pits we could find nothing wrong with the throttle, the blades were clear, the linkage smooth and the shafts rotated freely, so Crewchief Dean spent some time stripping and cleaning all the affected parts in order to avoid any further problems. After a test on the stand, we were off for more runs.  By this time it was about one o'clock and we ripped of a pair of runs back to back hitting 9.69 and 9.65.

We cooled off for an hour and a half and then decided to do another pair of runs to finish of the day, one in each lane. This time we got a 9.7 in the left hand lane at 137mph. Previous experience has shown us that we generally run a bit slower the right hand lane and this run was true to form with a bouncy 10.0 at 135mph.

Waiting for tea with friends..

Cool...

Read all about it!! Hero cards, colouring sheets, race date cards, take your pick..

We arrived on Friday afternoon as usual and set up making camp, the high temperatures made everything a chore, but it wasn't long till we settled down for a couple of beers and the usual Friday night Korma.

Saturday morning came and with the track opening at 9:30 we were keen to get down the track before the sun really made life unbearable. We headed down to the fire up road with a few more Bunchers and were pleasantly surprised by the lack of queue. this was to be a re-occurring theme throughout the weekend with very short queues and plenty of time to blat down the track

Guess who's got sweaty hands in those latex gloves?

Read what happened on Sunday......

Having strapped in and fired up, Helen ran a great first pass of 9.77 at a new Personal Best speed for Shakespeare County Raceway of 138.56mph. Pleased with this run and feeling comfortable with the car Helen lapped straight back into the staging lanes for another run.

The burnout was good, but as Helen lifted off the throttle the engine rpm didn't come all the way down. Helen had the brakes on hard as the Belle pushed forward with the front wheels locked. She came to rest in front of the startline and Crewchief Dean ran over to the car and knocked the sticky throttle off. Helen shut-off the motor and we pushed back to the wall before getting a tow back to the pits. (Thanks Bernie)

Back in the pits we tided up and checked over a couple of things, and put Hell's Belle to bed for the night.

The very hot midday sun had also taken it's toll on Crewchief Dean who had spent half the day running up and down the pits and driver Helen who had been strapped up in a dash 15 firesuit balaclava, helmet, boots and gloves

So, with a good days testing under our belts we actually headed off for an early nights kip, well it was eleven'ish anyway.....