Reigning ADRL Pro Nitrous World Champion Burton Auxier enjoyed a good start to his weekend at Virginia Motorsports Park (VMP), placing second in his Reher & Morrison-equipped ’68 Camaro with a 3.803-seconds pass at 198.15 mph for the ADRL Speedtech U.S. Drags IV and trailing only Mahana Al-Naemi at 3.784 and 198.15 mph.

But it was during eliminations that Auxier really shined as he ran an outstanding 3.746 at 199.02 in a first-round solo pass that knocked more than three-hundredths of a second off the class ET record, then backed it up well within the required one percent to set a new official mark with a 3.754 win over Randy Weatherford at 198.15 mph.

“It’s pretty amazing; I don’t even know (how I feel) yet,” the soft-spoken West Virginian said. “This is really a good race car. This is the same car that I crashed at Valdosta (in April 2010) and then Jerry (Bickel) fixed it for us and when we first went to West Palm and tested it went straight on down the race track and it’s been fast ever since. I can’t say enough about how good this Bickel car is.

“Of course we’ve been updating the motor, updating the heads, working on the clutch and more than anything else just trying to match everything more than just trying to lean on it real hard. We just worked to get everything to match and work together and it finally happened. I don’t know; it just happened.”

Reigning ADRL Pro Nitrous World Champion Burton Auxier enjoyed a good start to his weekend at Virginia Motorsports Park (VMP), placing second in his Reher & Morrison-equipped ’68 Camaro with a 3.803-seconds pass at 198.15 mph for the ADRL Speedtech U.S. Drags IV and trailing only Mahana Al-Naemi at 3.784 and 198.15 mph.

But it was during eliminations that Auxier really shined as he ran an outstanding 3.746 at 199.02 in a first-round solo pass that knocked more than three-hundredths of a second off the class ET record, then backed it up well within the required one percent to set a new official mark with a 3.754 win over Randy Weatherford at 198.15 mph.

“It’s pretty amazing; I don’t even know (how I feel) yet,” the soft-spoken West Virginian said. “This is really a good race car. This is the same car that I crashed at Valdosta (in April 2010) and then Jerry (Bickel) fixed it for us and when we first went to West Palm and tested it went straight on down the race track and it’s been fast ever since. I can’t say enough about how good this Bickel car is.

“Of course we’ve been updating the motor, updating the heads, working on the clutch and more than anything else just trying to match everything more than just trying to lean on it real hard. We just worked to get everything to match and work together and it finally happened. I don’t know; it just happened.”

Making it all the more remarkable, Auxier said his engine wasn’t quite right the whole time he was at VMP.

“We had a squeak in the motor all weekend; just a little one and you’d hear it on the burnout. We had one rocker arm that we kept on having to adjust the lash on it and that’s something you don’t normally do,” he explained. “So we knew there was a problem, but the spare motor I’ve got doesn’t have the same camshaft, same heads and it’s not as good a motor, so we didn’t want to make the swap.”

Auxier’s luck ran out, though, just as he was about to stage in the semis against eventual race winner and former Al-Anabi teammate Mike Castellana.

“That time when I pulled through the burnout I heard it squeak pretty loud and when I backed up the oil pressure fell off. So I shut it off because it would’ve destroyed the motor if I’d let the clutch out on it. Better just to shut it off and save it for the next race,” Auxier said.

Regardless, he was still smiling as he recalled the runs that wrote him into the record books.

“That 3.74 pass, you could feel the difference in second gear; it pulled 3.6-something Gs in second gear and you can feel that; you know it’s on a pass then,” he said.

“Before, on all the other passes, we missed it by a little bit, we missed the clutch a little or missed the shock settings, shift points, just missed them by a little bit and when we’d get to third gear it’d start moving around and it would just kill the ET. But on that run we finally got everything to work, and to work together, and when it went into third gear it went straight and solid, planted to the track.”

Beyond basic maintenance, Auxier said he left everything in the car as it was for the second round.

“This is an all-different-combination motor, different car set-up, different ratios, different tires; we’ve just been playing with things all year, but we left absolutely everything the same there. The air was a little worse, so we expected it to slow down a little, but we never even changed the clutch, just left it all alone and went back out there.”

And now that he has the record and knows what his car is capable of under less-than-ideal conditions, Auxier is eager to get the next ADRL event Sept. 9-10, at Rockingham Dragway in North Carolina.

“The air was not that good here (at VMP), 25- or 26-hundred feet, so I’m kind of anxious to see what it’ll do when we get to Rockingham at around 12-hundred feet,” Auxier said. “We’ll have the engine all fixed up, too, so maybe we can win one of these things before the season is over.”