This was not strictly a SUMC event, although they were invited... One of my coursemates from Salford, Andy Simpson, invited me to have a go, and even though I expected to be the slowest there, I thought what the hell - it was going to be an experience!

Also present were Bryan Moss and Dave Gamble from work (and also from Team Tornado) in their Mitsubishi Shogun Pinin 1.8 GDI and Citroen Xantia Activa 2 litre Turbo respectively, plus Chris Cowdery from work in his coil sprung 3.5 V8 auto Series 2 Land Rover. These pictures are from our final runs of the day - Chris had gone home, and Dave missed his last run to video everyone - thanks to Dave for the pictures!

Here we are waiting in the queue to race - I (Andrew) am in front in the red Uno, Andy Simpson is behind me in the other lane, in the red Beetle. Yet again it worked out that we raced each other - of the five runs we had, we only meant to race each other on the first! (We only didn't race each other on our second run.)

Yeeha! Funny Cars do big burnouts before they run...

Andy and Andrew line up at the start line, and they're off!

...and Andy's Beetle is ahead already. Andy gets a 20.783secs/65.36mph, Andrew does 21.857secs/59.66mph. This wasn't our best run of the day...

...Andrew's was his third, at 21.499secs/60.27mph, while his best terminal speed was 61.74mph (on his fourth run). Out of the four of Andy's that I have the data for, his first run was his best, at 19.828secs/65.54mph.

Bryan's last run was against a Ford Poplar funny car - and he beat it! However, that's only because the Poplar jumped the start...

The Calibra funny car on the right was one of the fastest last year. It's had a complete rebuild and has an even bigger engine this year...

Given the relatively low cost of the event (8 quid to get in and 10 quid to sign up to race) it was excellent value for money, and great fun too! There was a lot of people there, and signing on was closed at lunchtime because of this - get there early if you go, and sign on as soon as you can - you'll get a few runs in before the queue to race gets too long...

Have a look at the Santa Pod website for the date of the next Run What You Brung. Also have a look here (under the 'The Reaction Time Clinic' section) for details of how the start line procedure works - a Pro tree was used at this event.

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