The Schulte Racing Team powered itself to another win, after winning the season opener a few weeks earlier, at Mission Raceway Park’s 1/4 mile drag strip in the fast Canada West Doorslammer drag race series.
Crew Chief Leslie Schulte says, “It’s rare to see a team win the first two races after a long winter pause, but hey, we’ll take it! We struggled last year after we purchased this rocket due to breakage and just getting use to the radical acceleration. But we were 100 per cent ready coming out this year.”
Driver Otto Schulte said conditions were very challenging in race #2: “The air temperatures reached 32’C and the track surface temperatures exceeded 130’ F (54’C). Imagine putting on a parka in the summer complete with boots, gloves and a helmet. Honestly, it’s brutal being strapped into the roll cage which feels more like being roasted in an oven. To top things off the track surface begins to deteriorate at those temps causing traction problems. But hey, if you can’t stand the heat then don’t get into the fire, as they say.”
Leslie says this race didn’t come easily. “We had two rounds where we only took the stripe (finish line) for the wins by a margin of 3 thousandths of a second! At 180 mph (300 kph), that is literally like a hair width. We were just plain lucky in those two rounds. Some of those close races fall your way and others don’t. And to top it off in the Finals we beat the guy that we bought our car from last year,” she says.
The local race team campaigns a 1,200 horsepower ‘05 RJ Racecars Cavalier. If a race track were built at the Campbell River Airport, as proposed by the Vancouver Island Motorsport Association, this car would be a regular feature car.