Holy crap, it was cold at North Carolina's Rockingham Dragway for the last MIROCK racing program of the year, with temperatures hovering near freezing all weekend. Windy, too. "It blew the RaceWorks guy's TV monitor over," said speed merchant Dave Schnitz, shivering in his trailer door on Saturday night. Luckily, crack photodog Matt Polito and I weren't there to suffer through the frigid morning. We aborted plans to drive 13 hours from NYC to Rockingham at the last minute and instead caught cheap, comfortable flights from Newark on Saturday afternoon. Warm, well fed and relaxed, we rolled up to the track at around 8 p.m. and were pleased to find we hadn't missed much racing. Pro qualifying was just getting started at that late hour, and racing continued deep into the bone-chilling night.
Rockingham owner Steve Earwood's November event at The Rock (the final event in the eight-race Mickey Thompson Performance Tires MIROCK Superbike Series) is the last big dragrace of the year, and a staggering 430 racers turned out to see the season off in style. And damn if it didn't seem like at least 425 of those bikes broke and oiled down the track (accounting for some of the delay), giving us all another reason to look forward to the next racing season: mandatory ballistic catch blankets for all pro-class bikes. And really, any self-respecting sportsman should shell out the cash for a blanket, too-you Street ET guys can oil the track with the best of them.
Greene Makes Bank In Outlaw Pro StreetDiapers aren't the only things that will change in the upcoming MIROCK rulebook: The big news is new rules for the popular Schnitz Racing Outlaw Pro Street class that will put turbos in the deep freeze for 2006, giving OPS racers next season to dial in new nitrous combinations. But that's next year-this particular weekend Dimey Eddinger showed his turbo-charged ass to the mostly nitrous-fueled field, qualifying number one in OPS with a 7.091 at 196.44 mph. Track record-holder and defending event winner Barry Greene led the nitrous bikes with a 7.125 pass at 194.35 mph. Championship contender Tony Giardi qualified third with a 7.187, while his season-long rival Chris Moore sat way back in sixth.
When all was said and done, the title was decided in a second-round match between Giardi and Moore. Giardi took the tree while Moore wheelied in the left lane, and even though Giardi's motor went soft on the big end of the track he had enough on Moore to hold him off and take the championship. Giardi's luck didn't hold for the event win, though: He lost the very next round against Greene, who ran a string of 7.16s on the L&W Motorworks/Renegade Oil/Schnitz Racing Suzuki. In the other semifinal, talented (and hot) Angie McBride took out Coodee Thomas. McBride started the '04 season aboard George Bryce's G-Squared Pro Stock Bike, but after a falling-out between McBride, her boyfriend/tuner Landon Ingram and the Bryce team, she returned to her Outlaw Pro Street roots. "We went to a couple of races [this year] and didn't do too good, except for this one," said McBride, who is still seeking a Pro Stock ride. "But we had fun. We built a brand-new bike [complete with a space-girl paint scheme from Copperhead Graphics of Virginia] and had some gremlins to work out."
McBride took the tree against Greene in the final and ran a decent 7.26 lap, but nobody could stop Greene this weekend as he put another 7.12 on the board. "All I did this weekend was put fuel, air and nitrous in that bike," reported Greene, a custom homebuilder from Savannah, Georgia.
McBride, a registered nurse, echoed Greene's maintenance routine. "We just had to add air, gas, and keep warm," said Angie. "I think I had three layers of clothes on underneath my leathers! But we went 0.20s all weekend."