Just giving you forewarning that this is kind of long so if you have no interest in wading through my horrible grammar then don't bother reading much further than this. Yesterday was put up or shut up day and the 2 mouth runners in question were an older brother of mine and his mid 2000 sumtin Mustang GT and my youngest son with his WRX at US-41 Motorplex in Morocco Indiana and I brought my 77 F2 to play around as well. To add to the fun even more another older brother of mine and a nephew showed up with his front engined SBC powered 67 Corvair, it was more or less a Bail family track day and we had fun but boy oh boy did the drag strip kick everyone's ass. Even though I've had my 750 for a few years now and have ridden it aggressively from time to time yesterday was the very first time I attempted to launch the bike hard from a standing stop and I have to apologize to you guys right now because I did a horrible job representing our Hondas, I had nothing but blown shifts one run after another and the engine took an absolute ass whoopin from all the over revving. The blown shift going into 2nd gear on my second run was so bad it almost ended my day right there because the engine spun so high and floated the valves so bad it had 3 rocker arm adjusting nuts back off 2 of which actually fell off and were setting in the head, fortunately I had installed a frame kit by our very own 754 so I was able to pull the valve cover off and luckily for me those 2 nuts were still setting in the cyl head because I wasn't going to fire it up again until I found them all ....... I really couldn't have anyhow without finding them all because I didn't have any extra ones. I did get one run in where the engine bogged off the line and then blew a shift into 3rd but still pulled off a mid 15 ET so I figured if I could get a decent launch and not blow a shift then maybe the bike was capable of a decent ET.
The shifting issues turned out to be the shoes I was wearing and how I had the shifter positioned, I wore laced boots that went above my ankles but this was the first time I actually ever road the bike while wearing those shoes and being the toes of the shoes were a bit beefier I assumed that moving the shifter up one notch would give me the same feel but after at least a half dozen blown shift runs I decided to drop the shifter back to where I normally have it and viola, I finally got a clean run although I had a horrible launch again so now it was time to work on my launch but right as I was getting staged for another run that's when a big storm rolled in and the officials shut the track down till it passed. We had been there since since 10 AM when the track opened and it was now 4 in the afternoon, it was going to take at least another hour till they dried the track and got it prepped again and being all of us was tired we all decided to pack things up and call it a day. With that said my one and only clean pass was a 14.8 at 86 mph. I felt the bike itself ran well, it was the horrible riding of its rider (me) that failed.
The person who went home with the bragging rights in the Mustang/WRX shootout was my brother and his Mustang which pulled off a 12.991 compared to the WRX with its best ET of 13.08. The Mustang was all motor meaning no help from nitrous or anything else, my brother has been striving to get it into the 12's on engine alone for a number of years now so he was very pleased, he just barely did it but pleased none the less. My nephew and the Corvairs day ended abruptly on its very first pass, he was running 10 inch slicks with a 100 hp shot of nitrous, the car has a Corvette independent rear that ties into the original Corvair trailing arms and the shock of the nitrous and sticky slicks snapped one of the half shafts at its u-joint yoke the moment he launched, the problem there is that he drove the car there so we had no trailer to get the car back home. The track official at the starting line handed my nephew a handful of lug nuts pointing to another car nearby setting on jack stands saying "don't feel bad, these lug nuts are from the car that went before you"
