Two updates in less than a week; it's almost starting to feel like old times around here isn't it? It's not that we don't want to keep updating this page every day, but there's only so many hours in a day and for the last year or so, the amount of "free" (or even reasonably priced) time seems to be constantly shrinking. And when I look at how big, and out of control, this website has become, I know that even devoting every waking hour, every day, to it would barely be enough time to keep everything updated.

Complicating matters, and using up ever larger chunks of time, is my Top Alcohol Dragster. Now that we've got a race car that can actually go down the track, the time, effort, and need we say it... money devoted to it are going to increase dramatically. At times the website may suffer because of it, but the dragster has always been the number one priority and the website simply an extension of it.

We still haven't come down from the high of the recent Winternationals, and we're still trying to calculate the costs required to be ready for next season, but at least we have something to work towards now. ANDRA has just released their tentative schedule for 2002 and the dates are not quite what I expected. In fact, later this morning, I'll be on the phone to the travel agent, changing my next departure date from Christmas Day to mid-January.

Here's the list of the Top Alcohol series rounds, plus the Westernationals at the new Kwinana Motorplex out on the west coast at Perth, which we may attend (subject to finances and crew availability). This schedule may be subject to alteration, sometimes with very short notice (like last season):

It appears that my original plan of making three round trips to do the first three rounds, then the Nationals, then the Winternationals, is out the window, and we can plan on just two flights. That first trip looks like about nine weeks in total; a long tough "winter" for a Canuck, eh? Then I'll have the better part of three months to rest, recuperate (the bank account) and fly back for the season-ending Winternationals.

We've just received a batch of pictures taken at this year's Winters, and even though we don't have the story of that event posted yet, we thought we'd post the pics now and let you see how much we had at this year's event. Please note that these pictures are copyright by David Cook, John Baremans, Lee Davis and Peter Colbourn and may not be reproduced without permission from the copyright holders. These aren't thumbnails, so don't bother clicking on them to see a larger version.

That's all for today folks. This weekend is fully booked with another article to write for the next edition of SpeedZone (publishing date in less than two weeks), so don't expect to see anything new here for at least a few days. Until then: enjoy the summer. And thanks to everyone who wrote in with their suggestions about how to keep the throttle open on the dragster (see the July 3rd What's New for that story).