‘Scuse me for sounding like a radio ad for Orange County Raceway (now, sadly, defunct), but we just spent the past weekend at the Famoso AutoClub Raceway for their world-famous March Meet (The Big Go-West” as they called it). The track, up north of Bakersfield, was celebrating their 50th anniversary and are noted for some of the best drag-racing match-ups ever.

We brought 2 dragsters with us, with one making the finals and the other turning 2-connecting rods (the piece that joins the piston to the crankshaft) into shrapnel (see photo). But, all in all, is was an awesome weekend!

The day was bright and contrasty, and for gear I’d brought my Nikon D200, Nikon 18-200mm VR lens, Nikon 80-400 VR zoom , Nikon SB-800 Speedlight and we were on our way.

I set my camera up to “Auto ISO” for the ever-changing light and set-up the auto-ISO parameters for the type of lens I had mounted (like keeping the minimum shutter-speed at, or near, the maximum focal length of that lens).

The Vendors were all lined-up in the mid-way and ready to sell! These nice fellows had some cool t-shirts and other fashion accessories for sale.

There were some awesome cars on display in the “meadows” (I’ll be posting more shots of them on my Flickr-stream ).

The rat-rods were looking cool and were out in force, including one that had a very large circular saw-blade protruding out of the front grille.

Mixing up a batch of Nitro for one of the historic Front Engine rail-jobs (dragster) on display.

The racing got started and the noisy, smelly (in a good way…love the smell of Racing gas in the morning) action started!

The Blair Speed Shop Fiat Topolino (which means “Little Mouse” in Italian) was cooking.

Speaking of cooking, we cooked our Saturday breakfast special which is awesome. The recipe is: Take one heated XLNT Beef Tamale, place a BBQ’d slice of SPAM on top of the tamale (all in a bowl), pour Chili-beans over this, and top with onions and cheese. Mmm, mmm good, to borrow a phrase. Martha Stewart eat your heart out (or come join us for Race Breakfast one of these days)!

Another cool Topolino Altered breezes down the track.

A blown-fuel altered does a burnout to warm up the racing slicks…cool.

Doesn’t the guy above know smoking can be hazardous to his health?

The little plate holds the shrapnel of what used to be 2 very expensive connecting rods. Didn’t matter too much though since we couldn’t put them into an engine-block with a huge hole in the cylinder.

Wheel-standing MoPars where everywhere.

Top-fuel dragsters always got the crowd’s attention.

the Funny Cars too, like this beautiful Mustang!

Yeah, it was loud….

All in all, an awesome sunset to cap a killer weekend. If you can make it to the March Meet, I say “Go West Young man!” (or Girl) it’s awesome-good-fun.

All photos ©2008 Jim Dennewill