Bakersfield,
CA - March 12, 2013:
The 55th edition
of the fabled March Meet offered a mixed bag of weather which
didn't help the program schedule at all. The temps on Thursday
(50's) morphed into the mid 70's by Sunday. Saturday saw a high
temperature of just 61 degrees with track temps in the mid 60's.
With the Friday fuel sessions canceled due to rain, two sessions
were crammed into Saturday with round one of eliminations put
off until Sunday which was a perfect 72 degrees.
Rolling into
the pits of Famoso Dragway on Wednesday the team had two objectives.
One was to make strides with the never ending improvements being
made on the car and more importantly, to honor the memory of
their late CEO, Dale Singh who passed away in February.
Along with the
other teams, the weather issues threw Tom Shelar and the High
Speed Motorsports team off their program. Forced into two qualifying
sessions on cold track Saturday, Shelar was unable to accomplish
what they wanted with the car and was left behind the 8-ball
for eliminations.
However, on Sunday
the 8-ball factor didn't come into play as a round one red light
by Dunlap abruptly ended the weekend. The upside was they experienced
very little parts damage and did log some good information.
Here are a few
shots from the weekend.
Qualifying Session One
2:27 p.m. Weather conditions:
air temperature 58 degrees, relative humidity 60 percent, barometer
29.54 inches, adjusted altitude 561 feet, track temperature 71
degrees.
The second pair out for the session
was Bill Dunlap in the High Speed Motorsports entry of Tom Shelar.
The HSMS team was racing in memory of Dale Singh.
In the other lane was defending
MM champion Jim Young in the Illinois based Crop Duster owned
by Frank & Debra Ousley.
Both cars had solid leaves.
Dunlap was in test mode
and shut off early to a 6.068 at 211.49.
Qualifying Session Two
6:35 p.m. Weather conditions:
air temperature 61 degrees, relative humidity 62 percent, barometer
29.55 inches, adjusted altitude 760 feet, track temperature 59
degrees.
Due to the late hour and diminished
track conditions only a few of the cars opted to come out for
the second session. Two that did were Bill Dunlap and Jim Murphy.
Nobody was shooting in Dunlap's
lane. They left close together and were just 0.001 different
at sixty feet. Murphy stayed close to right at the 660 lights,
where Dunlap's' header flames went down. Murphy stayed on the
power until near the 1000 foot lights, where his engine went
silent too.
Top Fuel Round One
11:30 a.m. Weather conditions:
air temperature 60 degrees, relative humidity 59 percent, barometer
29.62 inches, adjusted altitude 571 feet, track temperature 66
degrees
The final pair of round one pitted
Bill Dunlap and Jim Murphy. Due to the weather and a late second
qualifying session neither car had much in the way of good data.
This race was over before
it started when Dunlap went red.
And with that the 55th March
Meet was in the books for the HSMS team.
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