Woodburn: A view from the stands [long]

["Roger Stockton" <stockton@racalcanada.com>]

Hi all,

My wife and I made our first pilgrimage from Vancouver (BC) to
Woodburn.  Neither of us have been to a dragstrip before, so it
was all new to us.

We had a great dinner with Ralph Merwin and his wife Carol in
Portland Friday evening, after checking out Ralph's temporarily
immobile Geo Prizm, his cool-looking SAFT NiCds, and the amazingly
dense guts of the Brusa/Solectria charger (Borg-engineered, by the
looks of it. ;-) We relieved Ralph of his set of tired YTs and
continued to Woodburn.

One important detail which was missing from the NEDRA site and
the posts here on the list was that access to the trackside camping
is through the main gates, and that those gates might close sometime
Friday night...  We suspected we were taking our chances by arriving
around 10pm, and sure enough, the gates were locked when we arrived.

The Janssen (sp?) junior dragster team had also arrived late and were
"camped" at the gate in their motorhome.  In conversation with these
friendly folks it became apparent that they had no idea what electric
dragracing was going to be and we had little idea what a junior
dragster was ... they were quite happy to throw open their trailer and
show off their beautifully built and painted rail for us.

There was still foot access, so we walked in and threw up our tent.
Other than the track manager (I think) tooling back forth in a (gas
powered) golf cart moving cones around the only activity visible was
Dave Cloud sorting out his vehicles.  Emerging around 7am to a beautiful
sunrise, Dave Cloud was again (or still?!) about the only sign of life
in the pit area.

Back out in the driveway waiting for the gates to open at 8am, we met
Bob Boyd and his wife (nothing like a truckload of YTs to spur
conversation).  Both very nice people.  Turns out this was to be the
first time the Megawatt Monster would be on a dragstrip and also the
first time it was run with all 6 motors (though Bob had tested it with
2 motors).  This is truly a beautiful machine, though I have to admit
that when admiring it in the pits I wondered about funnelling the
massive torque from 6 motors through a single ~2" diameter shaft
into/out of a gearbox that was absolutely dwarfed by the motor array...

I'm sure none of us can fully appreciate how Bob felt when he hit the
throttle and just heard the motors rev freely as the tranny let go at
the lights (though the long faces around the Boyd pits afterwards were
certainly a clue).

The Cloud dual GE-powered dragster broke fairly spectacularly on its
first run of the day.  Back in the pits it was obvious that one of the
motors was missing some brushes and holders and had a particularly ugly
commutator.  There was also a cracked gear and broken chain sitting on
one of the tires.  I was surprised to see the Cloud team busily working
away on this vehicle through the day, and quite impressed when I heard it
launch on the strip later while the blown motor sat in front of me in the
pits.  I still don't know if they installed a spare or just reconfigured
the car to run on the single remaining motor (I suspect the latter). Now
that's determination!

Bill Dube's Killacycle was truly impressive to see up close and personal
and fear-inspiring to watch on the track.  I ride a bike myself, and I
was more than a little apprehensive watching the bike twitching violently
under Bill on a couple of his passes.  Seemed that each of the bikes got
at least one good run though; Ron Campuzano made a very impressive run
on the Kawashocki III against Bill, smoking the tire off the line and
making very good time down the strip.  Father Time made an excellent launch
on Dragon Parade, getting a good lead on Bill (which Bill made up in a hurry)
and providing one of the more interesting electric vs electric races.
Odd that Bill didn't try the left lane at least once...

I was looking forward to seeing John Wayland run, but didn't see him in the
pits on my first wander through.  Later in the day I saw John looking rather
busy readying the White Zombie, so I decided to stay out of his way and moved
on without interrupting him after taking a couple quick pictures.  John made
quite a decent run, although it was obvious that he would have done better had
he not had to back off the throttle when the car started to go sideways on him
a couple hundred feet or so down the track.  I was surprised and disappointed
not to see him make another run (perhaps I was wandering the pits at the time?)
 - come to think of it, there was a spectacular smoke show later in the day
while I was in the pits, perhaps John *was* back out there... ;-)

One of the highlights was seeing the Maniac Mazda run, the other was seeing
Jim Ludiker's dragster run.  The dragster was just plain quick; the first
time I heard any of the few "ICE-heads" in the stands sound grudgingly
impressed was when his mid-10's time went up on the board.  The Maniac Mazda
was also a crowd pleaser, since despite its silence, it gave visual cues that
limits were being pushed (the light front end off the line and the shower of
sparks that rained from underneath it, apparently at each shift point).

Each time the Maniac Mazda ran, one wondered if it would come back under its
own power, or if it would run again.  The shower of
sparks/copper snot/what-have-you seemed to occur twice on each run, seemingly
coinciding with over-voltaging of the motors immediately prior to each shift,
however, the announcer said Roderick was running a 2-speed tranny, which implies
there should have been only one shift...

Overall, though, it was a slow day for the few of us in the stands (probably never
more than 50 or so at any one time).  The junior dragsters were loud, especially
in comparison to the silence of the electrics, but I really didn't find this to
be as much of a problem as the long periods of inactivity when the track was
supposed to be in use by the electrics.

One of the first comments from the few "ICE-head" spectators when the electrics
started running was that without all the noise most of the excitement was taken
out of it.  This strikes me as a particularly accurate observation, and one that
was effectively addressed by the Viper "grudge matches"; by running an electric
against an ICE, the crowd is provided with a context in which they can better
appreciate what the electric is doing.  They understand what the ICE car is capable
of, and by hearing the motor rev and work through the gears, they can tell that the
car is being pushed. Then, when they see the electric 1/4 of the way down the track
before the ICE reaches the 60ft mark, they suddenly appreciate just how quick the
electric is off the line.  Two electrics just don't convey the same excitement,
especially if they're not closely matched.  'Course, even so, it was disappointing
that after Jim Ludiker soundly tromped one of the Vipers, there were more people
crowded around admiring the Viper than his "Circuit Breaker" rail.  (I suspect that
part of the problem in this instance is that a door-slammer against a rail is
hardly a fair race, so no one expected the Viper to win but rather were impressed
with how close of a fight it gave the rail.)

I don't expect many of the people who participated in the junior dragster racing
were particularly converted by the day's events; these people consider a 12sec
1/8 mile at upwards of 50mph to be respectable and interesting.  After watching
a couple of silent 15-24 second runs (remember one of the first cars on the track
was Joe Smalley's 48V Fiesta) out of curiousity, many of these people got tired of
waiting for other electrics to show up at the lights and retired to the shade of
their pit areas.  What would seriously get these people's attention is 72-96V
junior dragster-type vehicles mixing it up with their cars in the 1/8th mile.
(Sub-96V so that the vehicle's 1/8th mile times would be counted by NEDRA.)

Similarly, what might go a long way toward helping spectators appreciate the
electric drags is to have more EVs run against comparable ICE cars; e.g. Goldie,
Jason Hill's MR2, Dean Grannes' rabbit, etc. run against comparable street-legal
vehicles.  The sound and familiarity of the ICE in one lane gives the crowd the
context they currently need to appreciate what the EV is doing in the other lane,
whether the EV wins or just holds its own, providing good, entertaining competition.

What the junior dragsters made most obvious was the lack of preparedness of the
electrics.  When the announcer would mention that the juniors would be up next,
within a minute or two there would be 50 junior dragsters lined up ready to go.
As soon as one pair of racers pulled off onto the return lanes, another pair was
staged and ready to go.  OK, to be fair, these people race regularly and have
much more practice at this than most of the electrics do.  Still, there were said
to be about 50 electrics present, and it doesn't seem unreasonable to aspire to
having more than one or two vehicles lined up within 10-15 minutes after the strip
is turned over to the electrics... the "relaxed" nature of the electric racers
also seemed to cost them in the eyes of the ICE racers, who expected a similar
level of organization as they displayed, and presumably as the other ICE racers
at their usual events display.  The electric portion of the Woodburn drags might
be best described as an EV show with the opportunity for participants to run their
vehicle down a dragstrip; which isn't at all a bad thing, unless you've attended
expecting to see drag racing.

I'm an Electrathon fan, but the race held at Woodburn didn't draw me away from the
stands and the pits; it was the drag racing that I'd come for.  It didn't seem that
many other people were drawn over to the Electrathon course either.  I don't see
how the presence or absence of the junior dragster crowd would have affected this
situation though; they were all in the pit area, largely behind the stands and the
concession, an area which didn't seem suitable for an Electrathon course anyway.
For me at least, the problem was that I didn't know who was going to run when, and
so I wasn't interested in wandering farther from the stands than the pits so that
I'd have a chance of getting back to the stands in the event that a vehicle I was
interested in headed for the staging area.  Given the delays throughout the day,
I wonder if the Electrathon couldn't have been scheduled to give spectators something
to watch while they ate lunch and the electrics were either going through tech
inspections or taking advantage of a midday charging intermission, etc.

Overall? It was a good time; we met more of the "personalities" of the EV community
and got to see some of the quickest EVs around.  Apparently, we also witnessed 13
NEDRA records being set, although I didn't find out until reading it here on the list
(Bill Dube's run was the only one I heard announced as record-breaking at the strip).
I'm really thinking about this electric junior dragster too... let's see, if I start
now, it'll take about 9 years to have a driver ready so I've got lots of time to
save up for and build the car... ;^>

Cheers,

Roger.

PS: should have pictures of most of the vehicles that made it down the strip and a
few that didn't.  I'll post when they're up on the VEVA site (by this time next week,
I hope).  Lawrence Harris was at Woodburn with his digital camera, so he may have
some pics up on the VEVA site even sooner.