08-25-2008 - The 2008 Milan event had some great highs and some very low lows. My brother Chris and I showed up at Milan drgaway early Friday morning to get a couple test hits in before our first qualier later Friday evening. that first qulifier was also first round for the Nostalgia Pro Street shootout that was sponsored by Flowmaster. As we waited to get in, Chris fell asleep in the back seat while I unloaded and set up. Chris after a few hours of sleep, woke up and we went to tech inso we would be ready for first call of testing. Passing tech we prepared the car and waited for first call. The call was made and we headed up to staging for our first pass. Not having a full crew there yet we made due and very impressively for a off the trailer run of 4.85 to 1/8th.  We made our way back and downloaded all the data when Brian showed up followed by Colleen with her girls. We now had a full crew and made our second and last test pass for the day. We had all the info we needed and prepared the car for our first round for the shootout. There was some confusion about the ladder but the NMCA did a great job of getting that straigtened out. It turned out we had McCoy first round  and they had the car to take us out if we weren't carefull. We pulled our cars to the water box and did our thing. Once staged we waited for the lights to come down and McCoy was the first to leave. His .029 to my .037. My car left hard and left McCoy behind very quickly. We went through the clocks with a 7.53 @ 184.39. This was now the quickest and fastest the Brick has ever been and our hopes were high. On top of that, to our suprise, we were sitting #2 in qualifying for Sunday's race , but with 2 more qualifers to go tomorrow with both of them being rounds for the shootout.

After a few hours sleep we woke up and headed to the track. Our first pass of the day was our second qualifier and also the next round of the shootout. We were paired with Jim Widner who ran just .01 faster than us the last round. We staged the car and waited for the light. As the lights came down, I let go of the trans brake button. The car left and 10' out the car fell on it's face. Jim went on to win with a 7.45. That was it ofr us in the shootout. After looking over the data, I found the motor was too lean. We put some fuel to it and waited for 3rd round of qualifying. The made teh call and we headed up to staging to make our last pass for the day. The track was going away and everyone was having problems getting down the track. I did my burnout and backed up. There were huge bald spots so I prepared for some tire spin. The lights came down and the car left. To my surprise, The car left and then spun once it got out a bit. The car stopped the clocks at 7.59 @ almost 184mph. I watched at the end of the track to see how eveyone else did. The good news was nobody else was able to better our 7.53 which gave us the #2 spot for race day. We loaded up and headed home with a good feeling for race day. After a good 8 hours of sleep Saturady night we headed to the track to kick some NPS butt. We got the track and  got a peak at teh ladder. The ladder had us up against Beeson first round. Dave is a good competitor and we had to be on our game for him. We jetted up the carbs as the weather seemed a bit better than the previous day. We then got the car ready for first round. The call was made and we headed up to the lanes. After a bit of a wait, I got in the car and prepared for first round. It was now our turn and we fired the cars and made our way to the water box. We did our burnouts and backed the cars up. We both staged and waited fo the lights to come down. We got a little on the tree as the lights came down. Dave's .067 to my .052. The car out 15' or so and fell on it's face again. My jaw hit the bottom of my helmet as I watched Dave pull away. It was not be. Dave got the win and we got to go home first round runner ups. After going over the data, it seems the air might have been a bit better than  I had thought. It did the same thing it did the second round of qualifying. We loaded up and headed home with our tailes between our legs. The good news is we didn't loose our 3rd place in points for the NPS standings after you figure the 5 ouut of 7 races counting. We look forward to getting out again to get revenge. Thanks to my wife Colleen, my brother Chris and my crew cheif Brian for all their hard work this past weekend. I am sorry I let you down.