Pinch yourself; you're dreaming. This really can't be happening, can it? Three days and three updates? No, it's just an "optical confusion".... or is it? Well, dream on and see what develops in your mind's eye.

When we left off yesterday (actually late Sunday evening), we'd just finished our Winternationals weekend, celebrating our second dropped valve of the event with an appearance on the starting line, regaling the rapt audience with tales of our mis-adventures. Then all too soon it was time to pack up and head for home and lay plans for our next downunder invasion.

While I got back to the real world and the real job in Vancouver, my faithful crew of Darren Fahy, Darren Grimes, Steve Piesley, Mike Hyde, Ken Lowe and Dave Coles started stripping the car down for the off-season. In the rush to get ready for the Winternats, we hadn't finished off some areas of the car and after the race we obviously had to strip everything down and see what was broken, and what needed modifying or replacing.

Barely a month later Darren sent me the first installment of photos, showing what the car looked like after a weekend afternoon with the spanners. Here's the pics from inside the container/garage at Ken Lowe's. PS: Thanks to Ken for the kind use of his digital camera.

You didn't notice any pics of the engine or driveline in the container, did you? Come to think of it, neither did I. Hey guys, where is all that stuff? Darren said he took the long block home and since I've got the cylinder heads here in Vancouver, they're accounted for. So where's the rest of it?

A few weeks later, they sent along some more pics (not the best quality - they're "frame grabs" from a video taken in Darren's garage) of some of the other pieces so I could see for myself just how bad everything looked. And now you can too.....

We could go on and on and show you piles of bent rocker stands, beat-up rocker arms, bent pushrods, melted pushrods, bent rods, chewed-up bearings, more dead pistons, ruined sleeves, iffy lifters, etc, etc,... but by now you've gotten the point. In less than thirty seconds of full-throttle track time, we managed to use up more than $10,000 worth of parts.

Yeah I know, we've all heard the stories about guys like Doug Doucette (who once blew up three engines -- in the pits -- at a race), or Doug Herbert trying to put a blown fuel hemi on the moon, but those guys can afford that kind of grief. I can't. My budget is whatever next week's paycheque is going to be.

It's been said many, many times that there's two essential ingredients in drag racing: money and brains. But when you're overly endowed with either element (like yours truly), then you've got a problem. A big expensive ugly problem. One that I'm still working (six months later) to remedy.

So where do we go from here? Back to square one? No, we're a lot further down the road than that. We KNOW (or at least we're 99% certain) what caused all our problems and we've taken the right steps (see the previous caveat) to correct the situation. We've bought the RIGHT valves and the RIGHT rocker stands. Those two areas caused the chain reaction of carnage that you've seen and read about it.

So when does it all come back together and start running again? Hmm, that's an easy answer: 2002. Exactly when in 2002? Hmm, that's not such an easy answer. Look at it this way: the Australian Nationals (one of only two national events on the Aussie drag racing calendar this year -- hey that's a whole 'nother story for later in the week) takes place next week. The heads are still being repaired, the valves haven't arrived yet, the pistons haven't even been ordered, among many other odds and ends that we need. Can you do the math? Let's just say that the Winternationals (in June) is a more realistic return date for Northern Thunder.

As an added bonus to tonight's installment, here's some pics taken at our test sessions last March and May at Willowbank Raceway.

That's a wrap for tonight's session, but be sure to come back tomorrow when we drag all the oddball pics we've collected over the years out of the files and display them in a "Definitely From The Far Side" special. Here's a sneak preview of just some of the stuff we'll have.