Gladiators in the Steel Palace

In his efforts to get to the Mills, Jason brought me a trailer this week. So I decided I’d try to make practice at Oswego. I finished all the little stuff and got the transmission back in, worked up a set of tires, and got a couple hours off of work. Everything looked good. Until I went load the car. It seems I put too big a spacer behind the bell housing and the clutch wouldn’t disengage. I probably had enough time to take it apart and fix it but by that time I was so frustrated I decided to call it a night.

I gave Dave Fetterly a call last night and we talked about the racing scene in CNY and where we might end up. I imagine we’ll talk a bit more tomorrow over some beers at RoC. We pretty much came to the conclusion that racing is expensive. We’re both looking at the 9/7 show at Spencer and maybe a run to Shangri La 2. He hooked me up with some help finding gears to run Evans Mills. Now I just need to scrape up some cash. And a hitch for the van. And a block. And some shocks… No wonder I don’t get on the track as much as I’d like to.

I took a couple of weeks off to see Dad race (and win!) and to take stock of my situation. I had planned to go to RoC but the money’s just not there to pull it off. And my fuel cell is too small to run all 75 laps anyway. The clutch is fixed and I found a few little things to fix that are almost done so I’m going to try to get it to practice on Thursday. But what do I do after that? Jason has been pushing me to come up to Evans Mills. I guess they’re down to 4 cars now. He’s bringing me some gears so I’ll probably make the attempt in the next few weeks. The NYSS guys had a rough week at Lancaster with only 6 cars turning up. I wish I could justify going all that way for $100 but at the moment even gas money is tough to come by. And I did some work on the van and noticed the hitch was about to fall off so I’m not going on any long hauls until I get that fixed.