10/9/06
The Queensland Government has a tourist message for the “sunshine” state – “beautiful one day, perfect the next”. The Drag Racing Nationals on the other hand over the last two years has been cancelled after being “cold one day, raining the next”. Despite moving the event ahead two months to get away from the storm season it looked like this year would suffer the same fate as Jon Van Daal reports.
An overcast Friday saw qualifying start under threatening skies but it was Saturday’s schedule that was to suffer. After a solid start the rain clouds moved in before lunch and qualifying was put on hold. Around 2:30 pm the track was dry and cars were moving into the staging lanes when another down pour started. The track crew were fantastic having again almost dried the track a couple of hours later when a massive storm system moved in and absolutely drenched the facility.
When torrential rain hit the track on Saturday afternoon, the humungous Brett Stevens tent was the place to take shelter.
With most of the day already lost to rain one would have not blamed the track to reschedule for the day after but while most of the lower classed cars had two or three
qualifiers the Pro categories had only one. With the memory of the rain interruptedWinternationals in everyone’s minds (where again the Pro classes only had one qualifier) the track was doggedly dried for a third time and racing started at 7:15 with all classes getting through.An early start on Sunday ensured that the racing would be well underway for the official opening at 1:30 pm. While those ceremonies were proceeding a massive cloud system moved in and rain started spitting as the trumps made their speeches. Fortunately it moved off to one side and the rest of the day was rain free. The same thing couldn’t be said for the crowds as those storm cells ran up and down the coast keeping the crowds to a bare minimum.