Open Sports Nationals 2017

Open Sports Nationals
Shakespeare County Raceway
Stratford Upon Avon.

At last the long summer break was over and we headed for Shakespeare County Raceway, the weather forecast was outstanding for the 3 day event and in fact the weather was the best we have seen for years in the UK for Drag Racing with clear Blue skies and the temperature reached 91 degrees F on Monday.
Brad has been the Super Pro Champion for the last 2 years running in the APIRA championship and we were hoping to make it 3 in a row.
Brad is having a good year, 2nd in the UK National Championship, 2nd in the Santa Pod Racers Championship and 3rd in the APIRA Championship.
In the 1st round of qualifications Brad got a lot of wheel spin of the line and put him in a lowly 8th place , in the 2nd round  Brad ran a 7.784 on a 7.78 dial, this time of 4 thousands of a second over dial put Brad in 2nd place, this was a very good time and we would be unlikely to improve on 4 thousands of a second over dial in.

This turned out to be correct and over the next 5 qualifying sessions Brad couldn’t improve this time, 2 other drivers did though leaving Brad in 4th place when qualifying was finished. The  first 5 times are below showing how tight and competitive Drag Racing is.

1st John Atkinson  0.00188 ( 1 thousands of a second )
2nd Brian Pateman 0.00224 ( 2 thousands of a second)
3rd Rick Cooke 0.00326 ( 3 thousands of a second )
4th Brad Jackson 0.00499 ( 4 thousands of a second )
5th Scott Hauser 0.01154 ( 1 hundredth of a second )

Monday brought the hottest day with the weather station peaking at 91 degrees Fahrenheit, in round 1 Brad was drawn against Ian Brown, Ian has a new car which the crew have been working hard to get the car consistent since the back end of last season, however at this event they were really on form and had set a new personal best in qualifying.

When the lights went down Brad had an uncharacteristic poor light of 0.14239 ( 1.4 tenths of a second ) and Ian pulled a 0.06762 ( 6 hundredths ) and the race was already over, Brad never caught Ian with this deficit, although he almost caught Ian at the line just losing the race by 0.01993.
This was a serious blow to Brad’s championship hopes, the Shakespeare championship (APIRA) was now lost, however good fortune did help Brad, Scott Hauser red lit, Brian Pateman red lit and Chris Parker lost his race, this meant the first 4 in the UK championship had lost , so this was a good result from a bad position.

The standings following the Open Sports National are ;-

With 2 meetings left in the UK Championship the result of the European finals meeting at Santa Pod next week will be crucial, look out on bradjacksonracing.com for live updates on Twitter and Facebook with live updates on the home page from Thursday 7th September.

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