2023 Area 41 Drags
Greetings,
As our season for NSS Inc. gets another step toward the end of the 2023 race season, here is a note from this past weekend at the Area 41 Drags at U.S. 41 Dragway in Morocco, IN.
If you weren’t in attendance, you missed a sensationally fun weekend. On Friday the temperature was in the 70’s sunny to partly cloudy and just a beautiful day. The pits were about half filled with race entries.
As a group we made three passes. The times on my time slips were 3:32 pm, 5:17 pm and 7:40 pm. We opted not to do a later run as some dew was setting in. They gave us a decent prepped track and we were limited to running eighth mile only due to some concrete work that had not cured, and management only allowed the eighth mile runs. The concrete work was on a guard rail and that enabled us to still use the entire shut down area if desired.
Saturday mother nature decided to turn up the heat which reached around 84 degrees at midafternoon. The sky was bright and sunny all day.
The rigs were rolling in early in the morning and the pits were filling up nicely as the morning progressed. We had beside us, pro stocks, E85s, Brew City gassers, nonaffiliated gassers, half dozen wheel standers, variety of top fuel cars and some other miscellaneous entries.
As we did on Friday, we were able to get in three passes. By design we did spend some time waiting in the staging lanes. There was no official schedule from the track so we were assigned lanes 6 & 7 and we picked our time to get up there and waited until they could get us in. We just made sure the drivers were aware of waiting and all got out of their rides and just hung out with each other in the lanes. The times on my three slips for Saturday were 2:54 pm, 5:43 pm and 8:01 pm. The second session NSS Inc. and the Brew City Gassers paired up for a shootout. There were thirty some cars out for this with cars being paired up by ETs. I don’t know the exact number of wins we had over them, but it was many. I ran their Prez and beat him by 11 thousandths of a second. Their prez talked with me later in the evening and said, ”they got their butts kicked.”
We had picked up a couple of cars that ran with us on Saturday. Mike Gudenschwager who purchased past President and hall of Fame member Joe Zajac’s “Rompin Redskin” 1963 Pontiac was in the pits with the car. John Grinwald and I looked him up and asked if he would run it with us and he said he was honored to do so as long as he could run his buddy’s 1967 Chevrolet each run. We agreed and it was great seeing the Pontiac once again in the staging lanes with us.
Another one of our past car’s the “Raggamuffin” 1963 Chevrolet was present in the pits and John and I again located it out and found it was purchased by the Horvath family that some of us are familiar with. They even had Dave Wesolowski come in and drive it in the second pass on Saturday. Great to see Dave and Jenn again. Wes was ill and could not attend. The Horvath family has three Chevrolets and are very interested in our group.
We also had “Wrangler Rich” in his beautiful 1966 real GT 350 Mustang run with us.
Now let’s get to our attendees. Drivers; Ike Andrews, Rich Berlisk, Tom Cartwright, Mike Cicciarelli, Dave Doyle, Bob Durling, John Grinwald, Doug Henderson, Chris Kuhl, Gordy Long, Dave Rehberger, Jeff Reynolds, Paul Rittenour, Craig Schreindl, Milt Schreindl, Dennis Sherer and Joe Szydlo.
Crew members; Shelly Smith, Dan Hare, Pat O’Brien, Diana Durling, Alicia Henderson, Pam Kuhl, Kelly Kukla, and Renee Schreindl.
Mitch Mannino even showed up with his dad to watch us, good to see him again.
Special thanks to Mike Singleton for driving down with Bill and Frank and delivering the largest shrimp I ever saw and ate. They were super!
The Double special thanks goes to Kelly Kukla and Renee Schreindl. These two ladies had their hands full keeping things organized in the staging lanes and also handling the water box duty. They worked their butts off!!
We also voted in a new member this weekend. Paul Rittenour and his 1969 Cobra (Torino) is now a Member of NSS inc. Welcome on board Paul! This makes two new members in the last two events with Dave Rehberger several weeks ago becoming a member.
In closing this was our largest turnout of the year and I thank you all that attended.
-Rich