Grudgefest at Sacramento Raceway
On Saturday October 17, the final night of Grudgefest was held at Sacramento Raceway in Sacramento, California. Grudgefest is an event where people can drag race their cars at the track, but instead of the normal ‘race yourself’ drag race where you’re fighting to get the best time, you can also line up against a buddy or competitor so as to see earn bragging rights (or money…).
It was the busiest I’ve ever seen it! This place was flooded with custom cars, trucks, and bikes.
A packed house!
Whereas most nights a person can expect to get 5 or 6 passes with their $50 admission, on this particular night most people only got 2.
People were lined up a long way to take their turn on the drag strip.
I went with my father-in-law Deryl, who has a customized 76 Nova. He’s been going to the raceway for more than a year now with that car. He started off in the low 13s after doing a motor swap and putting in a custom exhaust setup. And after each time, he tunes something else to get the car to perform even better. Now he’s in the 12.3 range consitently, and sometimes in the 12.2 range. He did 12.27 on one pass at Grudgefest.
Most recently He changed out his radiator to be a performance lightweight aluminum radiator, and also changed to an electric fan. These two mods were all about improving the efficiency of his engine, where the goal was for the engine to spend less of its resources on powering those two units so that it can spend more resources generating power.
He’s talked about possibly throwing a bottle of nitrous in there, but probably won’t. One key reason is that the bottle would probably give him an extra half second, which would qualify his car such a fast time that he would be required to put a roll bar in there, which he doesn’t particularly want to do. I don’t think he needs the bottle as it is – that Nova is lightning fast!
It’s was a great time, especially being out there with so many custom cars in one place. And unlike a car show where everyone’s cars are there just for show, the drag events let people really show what their cars can do.
