It’s been another exciting Titan Motorsports/ADRL weekend. We raced this weekend’s ADRL Hardees’s Gateway Drags II, in Madison Illinois, and what a race it was. In the first round of qualifying, Gary and the Titan Scion kicked it off with a bang, putting down a strong 4.063 @ 176.28 mph, before engine failure. Even though this run was good enough to grab the # 1 qualifying position, Friday night’s indent was just the beginning of Titans adversity-filled weekend.

On Saturday, the crew had their hands full replacing the blown engine. The spare was uncovered, and quickly dropped into the chassis. Everything was bolted down and fingers were crossed. The car was ready to go. In the third round of qualifying Gary was all set to square off with Tony Bischoff. “We wanted to make sure things were good (with the engine) and we were just going to make a 330′ hit to make sure we were ready for round 1″ said team owner Nero Deliwala. As the cars took off, all was well. Gary made the hit, and then shut the car down. Everything looked good with the qualifier turned test run, until Bischoff started to lose control of his car half way down the track. All of a sudden the car came across the lane, all four tires in the air, and began to roll. Gary, with split second decision making, narrowly escaped the path of the careening car, but ended up putting the Scion into the wall in the process. Both drivers were a little banged up, but relatively uninjured in the crash. According to driver Gary White, had they have not let off when they did, he would have certainly t-boned into Tony, possibly causing severe injury to both drivers.

Well, now the team is back to square one: banged up car, race on the line. Most teams would have probably called it a day at that point, but not Team Titan. Team Titan with Rick Jones, Rickie Jones, Joe Brown of RJ Race Cars, equipment from Tim McKamis and welding support from Kelly Campbell allowed the re-construction to begin. We had to duct tape the entire front nose of the car, as it was totally mangled. We also used fiberglass and resign to help strengthen it. The fuel cell bar was also bent way out of shape. We tried to straighten the fuel cell bar with a tow strap, but the first 3 attempts didn’t work and about pulled the car off the pro jacks. So we had to drop the car on the ground, Gary got in and held the brakes, we held the car back and brought our Mule (tow vehicle) and used it to be weight/leverage to straighten it. The mule started moving, so we had to hold its brakes. Slowly the bar started to straighten. We needed to move it like 6″ and it moved 1-1/2” so that was about 1hr in and we weren’t getting very far. We went and Robert Patrick had an acetylene torch and we had to cut all the wiring out of the way, remove any fuel that were around and heat up the bar. We also had to remove the fire bottle because the bracket that held it was bent, so when we pulled that out we didn’t pin it and it went off in the pits. It was an interesting situation to say the least. So we had to grab our spare and off we went trying to get it fitted back onto the car. Finally we re-wired the car, checked it out, checked nose fitment (a few zesus’s were busted) and got it working. We then did our standard turn around procedure and found one of the rear Mickey Thompson 10.5’s were cut from the accident. So our 2nd set went on the car. We then checked all the electronics and fired it up, and made sure the car ran good. The car looked like hell, but she was ready to roll.

In the first round of eliminations, we ran against Jason Wilson. Gary was able to put down a 4.145 @ 179 for the win. In the second round, the team was pitted against Jeff Dickey. Dickey ran a respectable 4.181 @ 177.14, but was not able to best the Scion’s 4.107 @ 179.88. In the semi-finals we were up against Billy Glidden. With nearly identical reaction times the cars were off and running. In the end, the huge displacement of Glidden’s engine stole the show with a 4.093 @ 175.78 mph to our 4.128 @ 177.14.

Wow what a weekend! Despite the tremendous setbacks, the team really pulled it together this weekend. We hope to have the car back in tip top shape for the next race in Ohio. Until then, we will be doing our share of tinkering and testing. Please join us on August 21-22 as we race the Ohio Drags III, at National Trail Raceway. We’ll see you at the races!