This is getting good. Round 2 brings a bigger parts budget - $3500. A lot more mods can be made with this kind of paper. And the baseline times are actually the times from the Elimination Races from Round 1, when they were racing to win. So the times are pretty solid.
Motorsports Authority was first in the garage with the Nissan. They started early in the morning, a fact that they weren't happy about....these guys like to stay out late and sleep in. So the mood was a little quiet in the beginning. I loved how Mike "Batman" Provost (the driver and the guy who said he was going to leave most of the mods to his teammates) started with removing weight from the car and immediately conned Bryan Lin into helping him. Hey, the Nissan belongs to him, he's been paying the note for the last few months even though the car has been impounded and he hasn't been able to drive his baby. I'm sure when he started ripping out the interior he wanted to make sure it was all going to go back in there correctly.
So nitrous is going to be the deal in this round. The tough thing for Motorsports Authority was that they had never actually installed one.
In Round 1, four hours was probably too much garage time. But in this round, four hours goes by fast. So fast that this team didn't get everything done. A wire fell out in the last 30 seconds that supplies power to the nitrous system. On Elim day, the teams can't tweak their cars before the first race. Now, they do have 15 minutes between races to tune and they could connect the wire then, but they were going to have to run that first race without nitrous.
Batman had a plan though. he was going to go to the line and bluff. he was going to purge the system to make his opponent think his nitrous was hot, and then just hope something happened to let him win. After all, there can always be surprises in drag racing, right?
So now Straight Line Racing comes into the garage with their Mustang Cobra. Sweet ride. And they're installing nitrous too. The crew was juiced to see these two cars race.
When Straight Line's parts were laid out on the table, there was some doubt about whether they could install them all in four hours. There was a lot of stuff on that table. They had a full nitrous system, a Magna Flow cat back exhaust, Handheld Self-Tuner, Fuel Pump & Throttle Body, Fuel Pressure Regulator, Fuel Filter & Spark Plugs/wires, Digital RPM Window Switch, Sub-Frame Connectors, Adjustable Rear Shocks, and a 4.6 UnderDrive Crank Pulley.
There was also some smack talk. Team leader and driver, Caleb Emberson, showed no love for his opponent's driving skills. He said he didn't think he was a "real" racer because he isn't at the track every weekend.
They stopped their time and went outside to dyno the car. But when they go the car on the dyno, they found that they had neglected to reconnect the air temp sensor. So they were worried that their car might blow up on the dyno....and in the first race. But they could purge. And make Motorsports Authority think their nitrous was working.
So both teams had the same strategy....bluff their opponent at the line. The PIPES crew were the only ones that knew both teams had basically the same problem and both teams were going to try to get inside each other's head. Fun.
In Round One, Motorsports had some problems with their burn out. They tracked water onto their wheels and spun at the start. So this time, they did several burn outs. A lot of burn outs actually. They ended up burning their clutch out.
Both teams sprayed in the second race, but the Nissan was done. The Mustang beat them by half a track and moved on to Round 3 here they will get $5000 in parts, more time in the garage and an extra crew member.
We've got two Mustangs in the competition. Can they hang?
