Alberni Valley drag racer Dyan Lover has had a great year on the quarter-mile this season, including a second-place finish at the NHRA National Open in Mission, the Aug. 25 weekend.
Her first run down the track at the National Open weekend, Lover ran 9.212 seconds at 148.9 miles per hour, the fastest she has ever run with her 1969 Camaro. She kept going up from there.
“I had one of my best weekends ever,” Lover said.
“I barely lost to Brad Powell of Washington State in the final of the open comp class,” she added. She lost by 0.002 of a second.
This was not the first time she has been to the final at the National Open: she did in 2010, the first year she competed in the event, but finished second that year as well.
Lover also advanced three rounds in the pro class before bowing out.
Lover was at the Lordco NHRA B.C. finals at Mission Raceway last weekend, which drew racers from three provinces and four western United States who race in Division 6.
“We weren’t really competing, we were basically test and tuning. We are running bigger tires on the car—I put 33-inch tires on the car for the first time and I was smoking them,” she said.
She tried out the larger tires because she has a more powerful engine this year, but ended up putting the 31-inch tires back on and “ran faster than ever,” she said. Lover debuted her new 598-cubic-inch, 900 horsepower engine on the Saturday of Thunder in the Valley at Port Alberni’s regional airport.
On Sept. 20–21, Lover will return to Mission Raceway for DoorWarz, where she lost in the open comp final last year. There were 83 competitors in her class.
She’s hoping to top the class in 2014, as well as achieve another goal. In Grade 10 she said she wanted to build an eight-second street car. She’s hoping to do that at Door Warz.
“If I knock off two-tenths of a second off my time, I can cross that off my bucket list.”
editor@albernivalleynews.com