Columbus, Ohio -2007 National Hot Rod Reunion
7/15/07
Travel… Racing….. Travel…. Racing…. Things have been pretty hectic in the Privitera household lately, between travel and racing. The month of June was a blur but also a lot of fun. The team recently headed to Columbus, Ohio for the NHRA hot rod reunion. This is one of our favorite races of the year and we had a ton of fun. The Pmotorsports crew arrived on Thursday morning after driving all night from our base of operations in Maryland, we setup our pit, and prepped the cars. Then we went out to the Jegs facility in Delaware, Ohio where they treated us to a great BBQ dinner. They had a car show and offered tours of what seemed to be a 10 million square foot facility. Of course I am kidding but it was huge. We then met Jeg Coughlin Jr. and Sr. as well as several members of the Coughlin family. We had a great time but needed to get back to the track so we could sleep and be ready for time runs on Friday.
Friday came and we were set, all of our I’s dotted and T’s crossed. I went up and made my first time run, the car seemed to be running well until about the 1000 foot mark. Then I started noticing things, the power fell off a little and as I scanned the gauges to find the oil pressure started falling….. and falling…. And falling so I crossed the finish line threw the chutes and killed the engine. I also checked for a trail behind the car to make sure I hadn’t lost something along the way, like all of the oil in the pan. We towed the car back to the pits and found that we had hurt the engine pretty badly. So we decided to start pulling it immediately.
In about 90 minutes we had the old engine out and were working on setting up our spare. The track called for the second time run of the day. I went up with my dad to help him on the line, and the rest of the crew stayed back working on the engine swap. Dad made a great pass and we had his car dialed in for Saturday. We decided after that run to take a break and eat something since all of us were running on fumes. We ate dinner and went back to work on my car, we took our time making sure not to rush and miss something. Within a few hours we had the spare engine in and purring like a kitten. Saturday offered a few more time runs and we quickly realized that this spare engine was not making the power that our primary did. So we changed the class we were racing in and ran the car full out in the 9.0s index. The car ran consistently and we made some small fuel system modifications to get the tune up just right. Finally it came time for the first round of eliminations. Unfortunately things didn’t go well for me, there was some confusion on the starting line and one of my crew members standing on the outside of the car tripped the stage beam with his foot. I thought I had staged the car, instead his foot was breaking the beam and the starter set the tree then when he moved my lane “red lit”. We can say we have another lesson learned and the poor guy felt awful, but that’s racing. Needless to say we had a great time and we were really proud of ourselves for completing the engine swap and getting the car running after a catastrophic failure. All of the guys parked around us were impressed as well. They would walk by and say “you guys carry a spare bullet” We would look back and say “Yeah, what do you put in your engine cabinet” they would say “uh I don’t know….. there’s some tools and cleaning stuff and a bunch of junk.” I don’t know about them but if we drive 7 hours to go racing for the weekend we are going to have a backup plan. We love racing, and I hate sitting in the stands when I have a car in the pits.      
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