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NOPI Atco (and Atlanta Re-run)

by Carmen Smith Filed Under:

Drag Racing

It was a busy and blustery weekend in Atco, New Jersey for the NOPI Drag Race event. It’s not easy to keep everything straight when you’re essentially running two events in one, but I’ll do my best to summarize everything for you.

Saturday’s qualifying doubled as elimination rounds to make up for the rained-out Atlanta event. It was a good day for Hot Rod Chevy Cobalt driver Bryan Jimenez, who wound-up with the Atlanta win. Saturday also resulted in a hard-fought win for Gary Gardella in Pro FWD, who laid-down an impressive run of 7.27 seconds at 214mph. Later in the weekend, Gary was able to back-up this run, setting both elapsed time and speed records. Saturday resulted in runner-up Atlanta finishes for Chevy drivers Brian Ballard in Turbo Street, Marty Ladwig in Pro FWD, and Grace Howell in All Motor. It was not such a good day for Don Nase Jr., driving the ECOtec-powered Extreme dragster. He got out of the groove and, through a series of moves, wound-up hooking a tire and flipping over. Luckily, Donnie was OK and his dragster suffered only minor damage to the main hoop and wing.

Sunday was elminations day for Atco, and many classes saw results that were a repeat of the day before. Pro FWD was won by Gary Gardella in his Red Bull Chevy Cobalt. Marty Ladwig was runner-up in his Lucas Oil Chevy Cobalt. In Turbo Street, Brian Ballard and his Mobil 1 Chevy Cobalt brought home another runner-up finish, as did Grace Howell, running her Lucas Oil Chevy Cobalt in the All-Motor class. The result was different for Bryan Jimenez, who advanced to finish runner-up in the Hot Rod class; still a great finish, but not as good as his win from Saturday.

Overall, it was a good weekend for the Chevy Cobalt race cars. We’re glad to see that (knock on wood) our Pro FWD ECOtec engines are running so well, with no blow-ups. This is especially important, since have back-to-back events with Englishtown coming up this weekend. Englishtown is always a huge event. GM is doing another ECOtec owner’s event that weekend (see previous blog post) and the two newest Sosltice GXP Drift cars will also be running there. Looking forward to it!

nopi atco race results

Posted by Brad at April 30, 2008 09:07

Carmen,
Would it be possible to talk to the folks that upload the race results to see if they could do them in a more timely manner. I looked for elimination results until 6:00pm sunday evening and they were not posted. I know the chances are slim that they will do anything about it but for the people that try to follow the weekend while they are not there is frustrating.
Thanks and congrats to Bryan for his win in HR. Hopefully the trannies were strong.
Brad