This week I want to talk about what my milestone moment was in my drag racing career. I started racing at the age of ten but didn’t reach my milestone moment till I was 18 years old. I was a senior in high school, and I won my first race in a big car. This was very significant to me since I won it in the car that my dad and uncle used to race back in the late 90’s.
The Camaro was owned by my Uncle and my dad had always helped him with racing it during the 1990’s. Once they started growing up and having kids they both stopped racing and the car sat in the trailer for at least 15 years then was later put in my grandma’s garage. I remember when I was a kid we would ride over to my Uncles shop were the car and trailer were and I always wanted to walk in the trailer to look at the car. Later, I started working for my Uncle and at this time the car was moved into my grandmas’ garage since we were using the trailer for a Jr. Dragster I had. Anytime I had spare time I’d always walk down to the car and just look at the car and sit in it. From the time I had first seen that car I had always dreamed of driving it since the people around town would always talk about how fast it used to be.
Eventually the time came were I had aged out of the class that I was running in and if I wanted to continue racing I would need to move up to a big car. Me and my dad looked at a lot of different race cars but never found anything that was nice and in our price range. After looking for a while my dad talked to my uncle and asked if we could use his car since we thought this would be the cheapest way to get racing even though we wouldn’t own the car. The only downside to this is that the car had been sitting for about 20 years which meant it was outdated and that the motor that was in it also wasn’t good anymore.
Once we got the car we stripped it all the way down to a bare chassis and pulled the old motor and transmission out of it. We had to send the transmission off to get rebuilt and then my uncle built us another Big Block Chevy for it that had parts from a bunch of spare parts around the shop. We had tested the car a lot and had a lot of different issues that we had to work out on the car since it had been sitting for so long. Most of this happened my junior year of high school so by time my senior year came around the car was finally competitive.
It was the first week of April and the track had a race that was taking place on a Wednesday night. Normally we didn’t run during the week since with school and work it was difficult, but we decided to go to this one. The car ran really well, and I did good behind the wheel which helped us to be able to pull of the win. If was just a great feeling for me to win in the car that my dad and uncle used to race together back in the day. After winning just seeing my dad’s face you could just seen were it just took him back in time. Of course, winning is a big thing in drag racing and that’s because it earns you a lot of respect from other racers, so this helped to show the others that I was capable of winning races.
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