07 Januari 2012 Lex en Gerda Live in het Vara radio programma
Spijkers met Koppen
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Zaterdag 07 Januari 2012 zijn Lex & Gerda te gast in het radio programma Spijkers met Koppen van de VARA! |
Show time: 12:00 - 14:00
Always a live performance of an artist or band
Free Entree!!
Blog: Sunday 25th September 2011: Commentary at finals and the 1000ft change
At the end of my last blog I mentioned my attendance at the European Finals,
which at first seemed to be certain to happen but sadly we had to pull the plug at the last moment. Since we didn’t run a serious number of races in 2011, it was difficult for me to keep enough crew interested in spending their time in our team. This said, I had to fly in experienced crew members from the
US to get the chance to make a decent and safe outing. The funding to get
those guys over was not received in time which left me no choice
but to withdraw our team from the race. At least the good thing about all this is that the car is ready to go and we can expand our parts inventory over the
winter to get ready for the 2012 season. We will also make time to attract new crew members and train them for their new job which will help us to have a flying start next season.
I made the decision to fly over to the United Kingdom and be part of
Saturday's Euro Finals Qualifying to support the MPM teams and meet my
fans who are really awesome. The fact that our team has not made a lot of
outings the last two years has not interfered with the contact and support I
get from my fans and supporters. To get from the airport to Santa Pod I
hired a car from Alamo with the special drag racing discount as advertised.
Amazing but true, they gave me a brand new Ford Focus with just 3 miles on
the clock, very friendly people at the desk and an awesome rate, what more
do you want from your rental car company, awesome job Alamo.
I had a great time in the tower assisting Colin and Darryl with commentating
on all the action in the Top Fuel third Qualifying round. The final elimination
round in Top Fuel on Sunday was a thriller, which had the best ingredients
possible. Congratulations to Urs and his team on winning the 2011
Championship. Also it was the last race for Andy Carter; although he and I
have had our moments on and off the track I found it sad to see that he didn’t qualify for his last race before signing off. Andy’s crew gave him a
dignified salute when he idled down the track after Sunday's first round of
TF elimination.
This week the announcement was made that Top Fuel will be run over a 1000 ft distance in 2012. This rule is copied from the NHRA where they changed the
distance for the Nitro classes from 1320 ft (402 metres) to 1000 ft (301
metres) because of safety reasons. Some of the tracks in the USA are getting
too short in comparison to the speeds, those tracks were built in the 1960s
when speeds weren't much more than 200 mph but nowadays 335 mph is
possible. After some tragic accidents the NHRA decided to shorten the track
to get the speeds down and create more track to stop the cars. It does also
help the rear tires from getting too hot and blowing into pieces. Right now we
see speeds of around 325 mph at a 1000 ft which has made the NHRA decide to reset the RPM limiter so it will allow less pre ignition during the last part of
the run, which will kill the speed over the 1000 feet. For us in Europe,
most tracks are not sufficient quality to see runs in the 3.7 seconds
over 320 mph, except for Tierp which is built to NHRA standards. We have to
deal with asphalt tracks where the NHRA is using concrete which will give
better grip. When we ran our car in the USA, we could run a lot more clutch
weight because of the amount of grip the track gave us; more grip means more horsepower that we can feet through the clutch which will give the quick ET’s and speeds. We have run 3.9 runs to 1000 ft in Europe before, which will be the ET to shoot for; reaction times will be more important because there is less real estate to make up ground for leaving the start line later then your opponent.
9/11 Tribute
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Lex Joon Racing is proud to carry the 9/11 Fueled by the Fallen logo at their Top Fuel dragster. This logo is specially designed in memory of the fallen that lost their lives during the attacks on September 11, 2001. Lex and Gerda Joon, team owners of Lex Joon Racing are honored to be involved in the work and support from Fueled By the Fallen. “We always have had a great interested in the USA, Living the American dream is what it's all about, Gerda and myself are inspired by this huge country were freedom is written with a capitol F” according to Lex. |
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Fueled By The Fallen mission is to assists supporting US Military Members, Public Safety Personnel, and their Families to aid in their emotional, physical, and financial recovery needs by displaying and racing Memorial Race cars.
Kevyn Major Howard, “Rafterman” from Stanley Kubrick’s blockbuster film Full Metal Jacket started the Fueled By The Fallen, a non-profit organization. With the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks just around the corner, a new memorial to the fallen is about to make its debut.“One morning, I woke up and I tried to recall a name of a fallen hero that died for my personal freedom and I couldn’t do it,” said Kevyn Major Howard. That’s how Howard’s nonprofit organization, Fueled by the Fallen, was born. More details can be found @ http://www.fueledbythefallen.org/
MPM Internationals & Nitrolympics update:
The Holiday season is underway, and all the children are on school break also, so I see a lot of happy faces around me, which is good because there is nothing better than being connected with people enjoying themselves and the sunny weather.
In my last blog I mentioned the possibility of us attending the Hockenheim FIA event, a decision I could make following our demonstration runs at the MPM Internationals at our home track in Drachten. After our Main Event outing, after coming back from the USA, the car had some issues that needed to be rectified, which we tracked down and we were ready to run rounds on the Monday at the Main Event, but the event was washed out on the Monday as you know. We decided to use the MPM Internationals demo runs, as an opportunity to prove and assure us that we had identified the issues, and had indeed sorted the gremlins with the car.
Although the weather conditions wasn’t in our favour at Drachten, we have to say that the track crew did an outstanding job preparing the track, and the car showed us its real potential, running some awesome 60 and 330 ft numbers as low as in the 0.830 region without dropping any cylinders what so ever. We couldn’t make it to the 1/8 mile cone under power because of traction problems, but we still ran a 3.8 second after only being on the loud peddle for 1.8 seconds. After this we are more than confident that the team and car is more than capable to not only run with, but take out the best of the competition at the track. We had a great time at Drachten with more than 1500 MPM Oil guests visiting the event, and experiencing full hospitality. What topped off the event with us, was the MPM Oil “Shockwave” fuel funny car team were also in attendance, and making 3 runs in their new MPM Oil livery, and between us we gave the spectators and MPM guests a first-hand assault on their senses with Nitro fumes and ground shaking noise.
As to running in Germany, unfortunately we did not get the positive response from the Hockenheimring, as we had put ourselves forward some time ago to enter the Saturday night show for them. This would have given us the funding to run the whole weekend at the event, as funding is very tight at the moment. To cloud the water also, the Hockenheimring board has taken the decision that we would have to pay a late entry fee, even though we were negotiating our entry for the weekend long before the closing date. (July 11) I don’t want to go into too much detail, just because this is not the forum for it to be aired, but we do feel very aggrieved by this. I only want to address the fact that our team was more than prepared to travel to Germany and run the event, but now we have made the decision to save our parts now for another day which might be the Euro Finals in September, were we can support and promote our MPM Oil UK endeavours.
We hope our fans accept our apologies for not running in Germany, and we hope you understand that we did everything in our power to make the event, but unfortunately due to circumstances beyond our control we will not be there.
Hopefully, we will be able to confirm our attendance at the finals soon, so keep an eye out for an update.
| Gallery Update Our photo gallery of the Pomona, CA race has been updated! Check out all the new pictures by clicking here. |
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