National Finals, Santa Pod Raceway

Words and Pictures Ivan Sansom & Rose Hughes
Thanks to TSI Timers (Europe) for access to the timing data

For the car brackets, the National Finals is an end of the season bash to determine the destiny of the UK and Santa Pod track championships, whilst the majority of the bike rounds have another event to go. The headlining MSA Pro Modified championship series had a healthy ten cars entered, but unfortunately Andy Frost withdrew after problems in testing and then Graham Ellis suffered a huge over the wall crash that wrote off his turbo’ed Superbird and placed Ellis in hospital with fractured cheekbones, neck and lower back, broken nose, arm and collarbone. The Essex racer had sold the rolling chassis and has a new Mustang on order from Andy Robinson Race Cars, as well as having reportedly bought a Methanol Funny Car from, ironically, Adam Flamholc who suffered a similar Pro Mod crash on the NHRA tour in St Louis this weekend just past.

MSA Pro Modified

Bruno Bader came into the event off the back of an event win at the European Finals at the same track a couple of weeks previous and with a decent shot at the MSA title despite not attending all rounds of the championship and picking up the 100 bonus points that go with a complete roster. The Swiss driver qualified low with a 6.29 that wasn’t much to write home about, but paced the field by a substantial margin. Three rounds of eliminations each came and went in 6.2 seconds with a first round bye over Wayne Nicholson being the quickest of the bunch with a 6.203/222.31, and, after a 6.246/216 semifinal win over Kev Slyfield, a consistent 6.209/225.60 took the eliminator against Andy Robinson in a championship decider.