Well this is the latest from Carter Motorsport at the start of August 06.

I truly believe there is no such thing as luck in racing, always have done, but Sweden has never been a 'fortunate event' for us, (although we did make the final there in 03, but it was rained off) and 2006 was no exception. There is luck when it comes to the outcome of an accident, but there's no luck in the performance leading up to the accident.

The DNQ in Mantorp Park was a shock to us, in 11 years in Top Fuel I have never engineered a car that didn't make the field. But there's a first time for everything, and so it was for us, a first time to not qualify. The reasons were simple, there were 4 qualifying sessions available and none of our runs were full passes. Had they been full passes then we would have qualified for sure. The first 2 runs we suffered tyre shake at 150 feet, as did many others, but we were not unduly concerned at that point as it is normal to have to tune any TF car to a new track, that is part of the sport. The base traction changes from one track to another, then there is the ambient conditions to consider, engine power varies and the track temp varies. In Sweden we had many extremes, very poor air quality, and an extremely hot track. But like I say, even after day 1 we were not concerned.

By (Saturday) day 2 of qualifying however, things really went wrong, on Q3 the car was on a good run, making incremental numbers faster than some of the cars making full passes in the 0's, (even with the blower belt off!) but the belt always costs you and it did for us, a sure 5.0 became a 5.77 as the car coasted the last 700 feet and we watched from the startline.

But watching from the startline in Q4 was worse than that, a problem with the burn out and the car failed to hook up, it shook right from 100 feet, at which point it moved sideways and out of the groove, requiring a pedal but it was irrecoverable. And the car ran slower than 7 seconds!

We weren't qualified. All the competitors and people from within the sport of Top Fuel telling you how shocked they were doesn't make it any easier. It was very disappointing for the whole team to not be in the race.

But to be honest we were not even half an hour from this smack in the face when we held the usual crew briefing and started to discuss the future. The team are re focussed on our future, and we will be back stronger than ever.

We have also lost the Fia European et record that we have held since 2002. The et record has been reset by Haken Neilson, it's still 4.83 but with an 0 that's 2 thousandths faster than our record of 4.832. It shows just how hard it is to get these cars to run like that and do it twice. We know, until last weekend I had tuned the 2nd and 3rd fastest unofficial runs in Europe, and Andy drove em, as well as the official European records for e.t and speed. But now only the official Fia European record for speed remains in our camp at 306.36 mph.

The reason we still hold that record is because we have always had repeatability, and we hope that is still the case when we come out again, the reason we have won in the past is because we wanted it badly, and that hasn't; changed, the reason we had dominance in the past was that everything was good enough to allow our team to display its strengths, and when we come out again we will not just have enough to display our strengths, we will have more than enough!

That is our mission now, to get everything we need, to come out stronger than ever, and take some fight to the new and faster and tougher field in European top fuel. The sign of a fighter is not just how they win, but how they get up after a knock down.

This team can get up and we will, so watch out!

Eddie Corr
Carter Motorsport

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