Bandimere Speedway, or better known as Thunder Mountain, is a staple in Colorado. While I never was much of a mechanic, most of my friends in High School all had various muscle cars or trucks they worked on, and they would occasionally race them up there and I would tag along to watch. It’s a lot of fun watching souped up amateurs careen down a 1/4 mile strip trying their best to take 1/1000 of a second off their times. The last time I was there, however, was in High School, over 30 years ago. I decided I needed to go back, and as Matt really likes car, I figured he’d love it.
My folks have a really neat guy that lives across the street from them named Sean. He’s a car nut if I’ve ever seen one. I’ve gotten to know him the past few years and heard tales of his Camaro, Corvette, and his latest toy, a fox body Mustang tearing up the track. Let me tell you, this is no ordinary Mustang. He’s done a bunch of work on it, and it flies. So much so that he has to have a parachute on the back! Anyway, it finally worked out where I could go watch him on “open” night. Basically, that means anyone, and I mean anyone, can run their car down the track as long as the pay an entrance fee. So, we saw no less than 10 Corvettes in all shapes and sizes; old and new Mustangs, Chargers, Challengers; of course the classics like Chevelles, Novas, and Barracudas; and a few head-scratchers, like the Nissan Pathfinder and the Microbrew Delivery Mini-Van. Matt really got a kick out of it, and there were only about 20 spectators, so we basically had the run of the place.
When Sean finally made his way up there, he told me he was shooting for under 9 seconds. After watching most of these cars land somewhere between 10.5 and 18 seconds, I was anxious to watch him run. You can see the video here and here, but he barely missed it. He did it 9.08 seconds at 158 MPH the first time and 9.15 at 158 MPH the second time. It was damn impressive. He said he’s still doing some tweaking, but I feel pretty confident that with the right conditions, he’ll be able to nail it. It was a fun night and Matt now wants to go back and watch some actual races, so we’ll probably grab Aiden soon and make that happen!
