2007 Main Event Inside Coverage

Text Sara Magnusson
Photos © Sara Magnusson

An inside view of Andréasson Motorsports activities during Main Event
and some racing activities around

Friday - Getting prepared


On Friday team Andréasson, got the Top Methanol Funny Car scrutinized, they will not let you run if it's not through technical inspection. The whole pit area was already built on Thursday by the only team members here, Leif and Åsa. With them came Joe Pando (picture) from MSD ignition, he's here to help the European teams this weekend. He travelled from El Paso, Texas and arrived here in England on Thursday.

For this season the team has got brand new team uniforms, in the cool colours of black and ESAB´s yellow. They look much more fancy than the old ones. We'll se more of them later on.

The rest of the team arrived late just in time for bed. They got to go up early to prepare the car for racing tomorrow.

Saturday - First day of qualification

Saturday started early for the crew, they had to put the finishing touches on the car. At the first round of the season Leif is number 9 qualifier, he was on a good pass, at 60 ft he clocked 0,977, that was faster than the car in the right lane, Ulf Leanders 0,992 (picture). Leif had to click of after 1,5 sec to save the engine from more damage and rolled over the finish line with a time of 12,15 sec.





 

When the crew took apart the engine after the first round of qualifying they discovered that 3 pushrods, a lifter and the camshaft had been damaged, do to lubrication problems, the broken parts were replaced and the engine inspected. Then the team put everything back together, started it up and hit the line up for the second round of qualifying.







Everybody was exited to get out on the track for the last qualifying session of the day. When the crew was about to start up the car they discovered a technical problem and had to go back to the pit area again. After Saturdays racing, team Andréasson motorsports is last in qualifying and outside the elimination ladder with the time of 12,15 sec.

Sunday - Second day of qualification

Last night the rain started and it is continuing today. So what does the team do when it rains? Apparently there is much to do, a few team members put together a spare cylinder head, some others made a garage sale out of race parts not used anymore.

Joe and Henrik work together to fix some MSD ignitions, for their own team and others. Joe and Anders the tuner spent the afternoon discussing the new Racepack data logging system.

When the evening came the whole team borrowed two rental cars from Team Pritona and Persåker (thanks), and then they left the track in search for a good meal. They ended up at an American restaurant a few kilometres outside Wellingborough, where they meet the Eurodragster.com crew.

 

Monday - Elimination action


For most racers rain is a bad thing, but for team Andréasson motorsports the rain that came on Monday was a good thing. Because they did not qualify for the race they were out of points and action. The team sat in the trailer awaiting the decision to cancel the race and a little after 1 pm local time the decision that they had been waiting for came.

All that was left to do was to tare the whole pit area down. Everyone pitched in, after one hour of taking the pit area down, everyone stopped to warm up and await some late lunch, Leif fired up the grill and started to make lunch, he is quite the chef. After lunch the tarring continued, and a couple of hours later the car was in the trailer and on it's long journey home to the garage in Stockholm, Sweden.

Thank you for tuning in this weekend to read my blog.

See you soon!



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