The 2006 NHRA drag racing season is officially over. Our family gathered around the TV Sunday morning to watch the awards show before they headed home and put a close on the holiday weekend. We had a wonderful Thanksgiving and an added 99th birthday party for Granny on Saturday. Gary had to get his fix of quad racing, so he and our nephew Ryan loaded up and headed to Sand Mountain the minute the awards show completed. We were expecting snow that day so the rest of the family, that had to travel, left shortly after Gary. With all the company gone and Gary away playing, I was left contemplating our year of racing. It’s amazing how clear your thoughts become when you’re not in the middle of the season.
The last two events were the worst showings we had all year. One would think that we would do fairly well at West Coast tracks that we had frequented so many times over the years. In fact, we thought we had a good handle on things coming into Las Vegas off a win in Reading, however, the drag racing gods were not kind. We changed motors and tune-up combinations repeatedly, and did not get a handle on things until the first elimination round of Pomona. The bad news: no one likes to finish off the year struggling. The good news: we figured it out (unfortunately too late) in the first round against the eventual winner, Craig Treble. Good because we don’t have until next year testing to see if what we did worked.
We added more test sessions in 2006 than we have in the past and I believe that helped us. I know it helped me. The team wanted to gain some experience with the new motors and I needed to be sure my hand was in good “clutch flying” condition. The plan was to try to be consistent and to improve at tracks where we historically have not done well. Overall, we did that. We had more top half of the ladder qualifying positions and less variation between sessions. That was a big improvement for the GEICO Motorcycle PSM team.
If you happened to watch the Award show, what you
didn’t hear them say when announcing our team, was, we had one win, two final-round appearances, two semi ‘s, and six quarterfinal finishes, along with being one of the four Suzukis to run in the 6s, not once, but twice.
Most definitely, being the eighth and final member to join the Mickey Thompson 6-Second Club was the highlight of our season. Gary and I used to talk about running a six-second pass a few years back when I was a sportsman racer. I was so excited that we could put it all together and run it as a professional team, with Gary tuning and Doug and Debbie as the owners. Words can’t describe how I felt running our six-second passes as a professional team with the support of GEICO Motorcycle, Mac Tools, and SpeedDawg Apparel.
To some, a sixth-place finish would be considered “not great,” but for me, it’s huge. It’s so difficult just qualifying for these fields, and racing on Sunday, yet here are, at the end of the 2006 season with our best finish yet, and with positions 1-5 all being members of a two-bike team. We have grown over the years and continue to improve. Eleventh, 10th, 10th, and now a sixth place finish for our GEICO Motorcycle team.
Who knows what will happen next year, so for this moment of retrospect, I will enjoy our successes, learn from the mistakes and celebrate (for today only) our standings. Tomorrow, I will begin to analyze and organize the race data and schedule the test sessions for the 2007 season.