FIA European Finals
Thursday (set-up)
Coverage by Eurodragster.com

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19:30

Good evening and welcome to Santa Pod on a bright and breezy summer's evening. Racers are arriving in a steady stream and the pits are a hive of activity. The track is getting a sprucing-up too, a new fence running along the length of the spectator side and all the boundary lines and other paintwork on the track is being touched up.

Michael Malmgren's crew have driven here from Sweden with only four out of five gears on their bus, and no power steering. "We couldn't turn into our allotted pit space", said crew member Magnus Cato, "and there were two of us hanging onto the steering wheel". Magnus added that the lack of a fifth gear will probably add about nine hours to their journey home.

Peter Schofer's Top Methanol Dragster is for sale. "The car is not competitive enough", said crew member Gittli Kottler. "The engine is too small. So we are going to buy another car, but not until we have sold this one, so we may be out in a new car next year, or maybe not until the year after. We have a people interested in the car, and we have already sold one of our engines".

Regula Stucki of Peter Beck's Top Fuel Dragster team said that the team aim to get into the 5.2s this weekend. "If we can run that quickly, we will be over the moon", she said. The team's set-up is not state of the art but they have the added bonus of tuning input from Rune Fjeld, who is overseeing three of the seven cars here this weekend (Barry Sheavills and Andy Carter being the others).

Gordon Appleton's crew chief Adrian turned up at the track with his hair dyed blonde. "With all the Scandinavians here I figured if you can't beat them, join them!", he said. On the subject of Pro Mod, Hakan Nilsson's rig is passing behind the control tower as I type. There are still a number of gaps in the Pro Mod pit, but Tami Brander's blown-alcohol Mondeo station wagon is here and has already drawn crowds of admirers, which we think will be the state of affairs all weekend.

We understand that Pro Stock racer Rune Berg and his rig are stuck in customs at their port of entry. We'll try to find out more about this and let you know on our next update.

Ton Pels' crew chief Vincent says that the Zodiac machine is the only Supertwin TF bike with four-valve heads, so they have only their own runs to go on to set the bike up. He says that the bike is losing a cylinder at about 1000 feet on every pass. The team doesn't want to go back to the two-valve heads because Ton's bike is as quick as blown bikes to half track despite being normally aspirated, and has run into the sixes on only one cylinder at the top end.

In the pits we met our good friend Peter Axeldal of Swedish Super Gas team Little Big Racing. He told us that his daughter Linda's "Vopar" Volvo Super Gasser will be moving up to Super Comp next season. "The engine is just too big", he said.

We have posted some pictures from the pits, you can get to these from the raceday update index. We'll be back in the morning with all the latest from Santa Pod Raceway; action is due to start at 9:00 with the first FIA and FIM qualifying sessions at about one o'clock.