Ray and Kevin's excellent adventure

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well, i guess i will let everyone know how Drag Week went. not sure if anyone will even be interested without Elvis in the story but i will try to make it somewhat entertaining without making fun of Keith Turk to much

leave Fri after work and stop at THE SHADES OF THE PAST show in Pigeon Forge, TN. heard about it many times before. we get lost. the song Dueling Banjos keeps playing in my head. ok, so we find the right road to where we need to go and the traffic was insane. all of a sudden, a 6 lane road opens up in the little town in the middle of the mountains with all this crazy shit goin on. it was off the hook. HOT RODs everywhere. people lined the streets watching and telling stories how they had a car that looked just like that, bla bla bla. you know what i mean.

we walked up and down the whole strip. legs felt like rubber bands. calfs blown up like bowling balls. it was a blast. wish we stayed longer






i have lots of pics, just giving some examples

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We leave around 12 and go grab some food and head to Bowling Green for LS1 fest. sleep in the car for a few hours near the track. I am not a mopar guy but this was alot of fun. guys build beautiful cars then enter them in these crazy events. first event i watched is where you go as fast as you can for an 1/8th mile than lock up the brakes, get the car all out of shape and hope you dont slam 50k into the wall.

next event i watched is called auto cross, here is how it works, they give a 6 year old some sidewalk chalk and he puts all these wavy lines on the ground, then they put orange cones on the wavy lines. the guys drive their cars as fast as they can and i believe the winner is the guy with the most cones lodged under his car. its GREAT!!!

after that we watched two teams take regular chevy motors out of a car and put LS motors in. i think it was an unfair competition but i really dont care. this is all i have pics of. my batteries died in my camera and i couldnt walk from the night before

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we leave Bowling Green after 12 sometime. the drag racing is not nearly as entertaining without them locking up the brakes at half track. and neither of us can walk. 2 old men hobbling around.

so now were headed to Topeka for Drag Week. I started getting text messages from my good friend i first met at Drag Week 06. Lane Culver (culverautospecialties.com)is sending me pics of cars and i'm confused. all these cars i had just seen. so i'm trying to tell him i just saw these cars. turns out my frend Lane was at Bowling Green also and he didn't let me know he would be there. BTW, Lane's specialty is to install LS motors in anything that ran on rice. if you need work done from Lane, tell him Ray sent you and said a LS motor is a copy of a BB mopar and you will get a discount

here is the ride i was in this year

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on the way to Tokeka, Kev pops a sleeping pill, why, i dont know, we havnt really slept since thursday and its Saturday night. we get to where we need to be, take showers, and this is where i'm starting to worry about my friend i'm with



yep, thats right, he is ironing. he has already washed the car 3 times. i keep asking if there is anything i need to know but he says he's cool.

we go out and barge into the texas roadhouse 5 to. drink beer untill they have completely cleaned up all the peanut shells then we go to some bar down the street, needless to say, i'm wrecked.

wake up in the morning with a nasty hangover but we goto go tech at the track

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got lost goin to the track. not just us either




its like 100 degrees the next day at the track but there is a slight breeze of 50 mph that makes it feel cooler. lots of car to tech. takes all day

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we were hung over. didnt test n tune. went to take a nap. Kev went to wash his car again. I wake up to my phone ringing.it is John the Thirst Quencher(from the 08 drag week story). John bought us a steak dinner as to say, you poor bastards wont eat the rest of the week. and that may have been true if we werent in a totally stock car.

next morning we meet Skylar, dayshift girl at hotel


cleaning out the car we found spices from steak and shake, i asked Kevin where did that come from, and he said we went to there to eat when we were drunk


go to first day and it looks like Denny's camaro and Larson's car could make for a great week of competition. me and Kev hung around late to try to help anyone that needed it. one of my favorite drag weekers was still there, Bill from Cali with his enormous mustang. he didnt do well but he said he will be back with a vengeance next year as he plans to install a second engine under the 14 foot hood

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on the way to the next track we ran into Jeff Lutz and Gary. Jeff was great. Glad I got to meet him. Gary i knew from 06 DW. Here is a pic you wont see in hot rod

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GV was damaged in testing before DRAG WEEK but it didnt show any signs of problems till the first leg of the trip. I jumped in the car and rode till sunset with Jeff. pic of BIGSTUFF between my legs



lights didnt come on, so we pulled over, Gary quickly got them fixed and I had Kevin jump in with Jeff to get a real Drag Week experience


Kev rode out the next 100 miles of the trip while me a Gary swapped drag week horror stories from years past

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here is a picture of a big dog that hated drag week cars with a passion


i never met this guy but i am an anti hood guy so he is cool with me


Jeff Jr was driving the Syclone. truck was wild leaving the line

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we got to great bend and didnt have a place to stay and there was nowhere to stay so we just hung out with the Lutz crew and helped if we could.


20 miles away there was another town(why, i'm not exactly sure) we got a hotel there. there was 3 to choose from and one looked downright scary. jeepers creepers kind of shit. the second was hidious but not so scary. no one answered the door bell so we paid to much to stay in the nicest of the 3. pic of the not so scary one


that night we bolted my friends car to a pole. not because we thought it might get stolen but we thought it might get blown away. it is so windy in Kansas that everything needs to be bolted down. if your not wearing sunglasses, please try to wear safety glasses when in this state. you never know when a mail box might hit you in the eye

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Kev washing the car again


this is not a great pic but the flag was blowing one way and the tree by it was blowing the opposite way and i just chalked it up as an invisible tornado


Great Bend was an airport and was a really cool track. i was thinking all it would take is letting off the brakes and the wind should push the car to an 11 second pass


Kevin got his ass handed to him by the Baja truck




the Baja truck

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Denny's Camaro was tearing up the blower belt and twisting the fuel pump belt. some other issues were comming up also and it bumbed me out when they went out.


one of my favorite cars was also havig issues






look ma, no trans

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Another bad ass car had his door torn off this day. some pics
goin thru tech




OUCH

ah, not the right door

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The Hillbilly's brought a huge pontiac than ran really well. they were tearing into their car on this day as well



after not seeing a female all week, the Hillbillys blowup doll was lookin pretty good by the end of the week

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the drive to Amarillo was dreadfull. Kansas is a beautiful light brown color. no trees. we went over bridges that said river or creek and there was no water. windy as hell. it got cold so it was really cold with the wind. I think they should just put windmills in that state with a huge optima battery in the middle to store the energy and distribute all power from kansas.

I really dont understand how a man meets a woman there. someone needs to tell me how that works

i get alot of credit for spending 10 days in a car with Elvis but 2 days in Kansas and i wanted to get the hell out of there.

we buddied up with Lutz Jr and Cleveland Brown for the trip. here are some pics from that trip



total excitement






yay!!!


this was cool. DW'er took his goat off roading