The Road To New Jersey

Dave, Ben and I drove down to New Jersey early in the morning, arriving to New Jersey at roughly 10:30am. After grabbing some breakfast at a local diner, we went to the stadium to pick a spot to paddock with the rest of the NER crew. The rain definitely put a damper on things a bit, but that didn’t stop anyone from setting up and doing some practice launches later in the afternoon. I have never done a drag race event, let alone aggressively launch my car, so I really did not know what to expect. Thanks to the Evolution School Intro class I took, I got to take a few practice launches after learning the format of the entire event. I surprisingly had a much faster reaction time than I expected...And probably more than everyone else expected as well. I was getting a reaction time of low 0.5's during my practice launches, with the venue being fairly damp.
I figure that if the most power is produced above 4,000RPM, especially around 5-6, then I would slip the clutch right between 4-5, that way when it would catch, I would be at just about 6,000RPM. After finishing my practice launches, I had spoken with the Kuehls. Brian unfortunately injured his shoulder very badly, so he could not drive his CRX with his father, Don. He had asked if I minded that Ben and him switch places, so that Brian would then be co-driving with me. Ben and I preferred if Ben stayed with my car so we could push it to the limits and see the full potential of the RX-8, but we did not want to leave Brian hanging, so we accepted. Needless to say, Brian is still a fast driver himself, regardless that he's used to racing a front wheel drive car.