" Last year ended with the team trying to finally sort the Rover with the 'head fill' and Alky conversion, we ran it a couple of times but the results just didn't happen quick enough and if I'm honest I had finally got bored with fixing the thing . The thought of having Fred, standing over our engine at ten every night, stuffing his face with another burger while we where removing dead pistons was too much! Its not just yourself you have to think of but consider your crew, Ricky and Paul Dawson have had to 'band-aid' the Rover at nearly every meeting with very few good results and when one of the crew members (Ricky) announces he is to go and work on an oil rig in the North sea, its time to retire the Rover and build something else!

At this point I need to thank Rob and Nick at ICE Automotive, without their continued support, engine building skill and racecraft excellence I would not have continued with the Rover for any length of time, and to push that engine to a 7.68 is quite remarkable. So it will be no surprise that I tasked ICE with deciding on the replacement engine, initially we hoped to be able to fit a BBChevy but it was quite apparent that the car was not well suited to the physical size or weight so the only other option within the SUMO rules was a SBchevy. The Rover was put up for sale and the car was despatched to Silverstone for engine fitment, headers and other fabrication work to be carried out by Steve Green (thanks Steve), after a couple of hard days engine dyno work we just about made a couple of check-out passes at the Pod on a peak performance test day and with a 3/4 pass giving us a 7.90 ticket we were very pleased, better still Ricky handed his notice in to North Sea Gas!


WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?

We turned up at Easter and carried out engine tech with Geoff Martin, Nick from ICE was on standby to bolt it back together again. We needed to weigh 2369 lbs which was a fair bit more than the Rover combination, all be it that the Rover/SBChevy carry the heavier weight break per cubic inch, we guessed that the SBC would be a fair bit heavier than the Rover, but to be on the safe side we added 60lb of ballast.The car was taken to tech for a weighing, culminating in a slightly under-weight situation...........180lbs shy !! We then spent all Friday welding and fabricating weight bars ect, and this task had to be carried out correctly as Tech would almost certainly want to know how the weight had been added to the car, my idea of removing the 60lbs and strapping Steve Rawlings to the chassis would not have been acceptable!

The car managed a couple of good qualifiers on Saturday and Sunday, but a bit more of the Garlick luck ran out on the last run, with the digital MSD packing up at the top of 4th gear!! If it hadn't been for the generosity of our fellow SUMO racer Mr Paul Brooks, cutting short his day out, rushing home to lend me his new boxed MSD, I would not have factored in eliminations on Monday, thanks Paul from all the team.

ELIMINATIONS


SUMO has now matured into the kind of class where there are no 'easy first rounds', I faced Mr Gibbs knowing that their car was getting quicker and his super class education makes him a Jedi on the tree, fortunately for me his trans gave him some staging woes and we where through to the next round.

Great we are in the semis, but thanks to Mr Hone bumping me into No 4 qualifier position we get to face the No 1 qualifier, Mr Smallworth with an awesome 7.61 (trust me Fred, no more help from Rick on bottle warming!). From a driving point of view it was good to have treed Rob, but it was all we could do knowing the times he is capable of running.

At long last we are in a final, which means I can finally deliver some hope to my crew. Mr Kirk is a joy to race as we both enjoy a bit of 'play' at the lights, I had damaged a head gasket against Rob which we tried to seal up, but after the burnout the water temp shot from 150 up to 210 so the best I could do was to get a move on, and stage with some urgency, which maybe caused my rather early light (-0.0890) to Andy's unusually sluggish 0.526 , still a great race, even if the SBC spat its water out at the top! Well done to all the Kirks, you deserved it.

Lastly I have to say how proud I am to be a part of SUMO with a level of professionalism that surpasses all expectations, from all members. If you get a chance stand back and look at the class working in the pits, there is always a quiet buzz of activity and crews are always willing to help their fellow competitors when asked. Its also good to see that we all hate each others guts on the start-line!! Long may it last!

Well done to Fred for his 7.78 first time out with the Lenco, Paul for his 8.0 pro stock type pass, Nigel fastest ever normally aspirated 7.88 and a big shout to the Chilton camp who didn't expect to run at all, good effort boys!"

regards

Tim