Jerad, Keven, Shelley were all there at the track helping me out.  Due to the miracle of techology, Andy was there too.

Long story short, I got eliminated in the first round.  :-(

It was all going so well, too!  For the first qualifying pass the slicks spun pretty hard, so we decided to take some air out of the slicks and Andy suggested doing a longer burnout further out of the box.  That worked very well – there was significantly less tire spin during the second qualifying pass.  So we took a tad bit more air out of the tire and settled on 12 pounds for the slicks.  The third qualifying pass went by perfectly.  No tire spin, and the nose of the car was up all the way through the stripe.

And for all those three qualifying passes, I was able to use the new 3-step perfectly.  Flip the switch to select the 5000 RPM limit, do the burnout, then flip it back down to 2500 RPM before staging.  I was able to launch my car all three times without taking my eyes off the tree!

Then it got late… I’m so sleepy…

Eliminations round 1 came up…

My brain reverted back to the old way of doing things…

And when it was time to launch, I released the foot brake… but my thumb was still glued to the line lock button for about half a second before my brain registered why my car wasn’t going fast.  !@*!&@$!

That was a long drive home.