It's a drag, racing

Flew back to Norn Iron last week for my cousin's wedding and a visit to the gorgeous new Ms Callaghan, spawn of my best mate Christine. It also meant I got a chance to hare round in the modded Micra (now with bullbars, shopping trolley roofrack and added snorkel). It's a lovely wee car to drive - very nippy. I was dandering along below 30 m.p.h. most of the time though while I got used to its light clutch action (I feel like a slightly less xenophobic Jeremy Clarkson when I write crap like this). Maso was going a little faster though. Yeah, we went drag racing. That's how cool we are. Fast cars, wide boys and crash helmets.

Our first hint that Mongolia isn't going to be all plain sailing was our inability to find Bishopscourt race track. It's only about 5 miles from Portaferry, but it's on the wrong side of the Lough therefore we have every excuse not to be familiar with the back roads of Ballyhornan. To add insult to injury, it turned out that there were two racetracks, and the one we got to was not the one that was open for drag racing. We spent 45 minutes circling laneways in a 3 mile radius before we found the abandoned airstrip where cars were flying up and down and gunning their engines in a very non-eco way. To my shame I followed the Highway Code to the letter and signalled appropriately when turning into the car park.

I was expecting something out of Grease with someone in capri pants waving a scarf to signal the commencement of racing, but actually they had lights, a commentator, race vans and chips vans and a lot of wet spectators. Wayne, the organiser, let us have a free go to test out what our wee Micra could do. Just to make it interesting he put us up against their fastest car - the Irish championship winner to be precise. Throw in skid pan conditions, torrential rain and visibility so low you couldn't see the quarter mile flags and it added up to a pretty interesting experience. Maso rose to the challenge though, notching up an impressive time of 20.86 secs. He would also like it stated for the record that the car we were up against had intermittant wipers and we didn't, so that's probably why we were beaten.



(Music by the Broken Family Band. Of course!)