Well the 2011 land speed racing season started off with a bang for us this year. Kevin LeFevers set a record at the opening El Mirage meet in May! The new record speed of 213.609 topped the old record of 208 by over 5 mph! This pass also got Kevin into the El Mirage “Dirty 2” club. The team came back to the dry lake bed in June to see if they could up their new record but only managed a best speed of 212 mph. The July meet was rained out so preparations were made to reconfigure the car for Bonneville Speed Week in August.
Bonneville was a mixed bag as we had a major storm on Sunday leaving a bit of a mushy course for the next couple of days. We also had problems of our own as first the ignition system failed then after fixing that the fuel system started giving us fits. We finally got the car running decent and both brothers made their best runs ever on the salt. First Ryan ran 230 mph shutting off in the middle mile and then Kevin managed a best top speed of 235 mph after a bit more work on the tune up.
Back to El Mirage for the September meet and another 212 mph run. However this was the fastest speed for this meet earning us a top time trophy so we were pretty stoked about that.
In October the team decided to focus on trying to get Ryan into the El Mirage 200 mph club by making him the primary driver, as the boy’s normally share driving duties. At this point in the season we had moved up to a high for us of 12th place in SCTA points. That was the good news. The bad news was there was no breeze that morning so we had a lot of “hanging dust” after a car made a pass. This is compounded by the sun moving more towards the center of the course as the month’s progress during the season shinning almost directly in the driver’s eyes on these early morning runs. As a result Ryan realized he was outside the timing traps at about three quarters of the way down course because he just couldn’t see. So he pulled the parachute and missed getting a time or any points for this meet. The last meet of the year saw some improvement in Ryan’s speed as he managed to eclipse the magic 200 mph barrier on the dirt for the first time with a best pass for the weekend of 203 mph.
The end result to our season was Kevin entering the El Mirage 200 mph Club, setting top time of the meet in September, Ryan exceeded 200mph on the dirt, and we also won the LSR club points championship.
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