Area resident likes racing form - against the clock

Ray Wilson has built a time machine. But this contraption, complete with a remote weather station and onboard computer, is no DeLorean.

Wilson's ride is a dragster powered by a 640-cubic inch, all-aluminum rear engine that produces 1,100 horsepower when he's flying down a quarter-mile strip.

Wilson, a 55-year-old Colorado Springs resident, does most of his time traveling from late April to early November at Bandimere Speedway in Morrison. He competes in the Top Dragster class in the National Hot Rod Association's Lucas Oil Series in Division 5, a region that covers eight Midwestern states and Colorado and Wyoming.

Top Dragster is a form of bracket racing, which is much different from the NHRA Full Throttle Series that will also make an appearance at Bandimere next weekend for the Mile-High Nationals.

"In bracket racing, it's not necessarily who gets there first," said Wilson, who will race in the Super Comp class next weekend at Bandimere. "You have a target (time) to hit. You hit that target, you're good. Go too fast, you lose. So you want to be as close to it as you can without going too fast."

Wilson and his crew - comprised of son-in-law Chris Woolverton and Chris' father, Ed Woolverton - determine that target time, or ET for elapsed time, by using Crew Chief Pro, a computer software program.

When Wilson arrives at a track, he sets up a weather station in the trailer he uses to haul his dragster. Several instruments mounted on the outside send information to a laptop computer that figures the ET.

Once Wilson and his opponent are called to the start line, Wilson informs the officials of his ET.

And from there, his time machine takes over.

"We have computers in the car that control the throttle that we put timers in," he said. "I can tell that car to slow down, how fast to slow down, how far to slow down, how far to stay down, how fast to come back up and when to come back up to make it run that (ET)."

So when Wilson pulls up to the start line, his only concern is response time.

In most of the races he enters, drivers get three yellow warning lights before the green light. Each yellow light is lit for a half-second, giving drivers 1.5 seconds to respond before firing the engine. Even with all the technology, the driver with the best response time usually wins.

For Wilson, drag racing is both an art and a science - something he fell in love with early in his life.

Growing up in a St. Louis suburb, Wilson said he and his friends "used to skip school and go to the drag races." But Wilson didn't get behind the wheel until the Air Force brought him to Colorado Springs in 1973.

Wilson, who worked with the parachute team at the academy as a flight mechanic until 1976, started racing on Fridays in 1975 at a 1/8-mile drag strip just a mile-and-a-half east of Peterson Field.

The track closed a few years later and Wilson sold his racing remnants in 1981-82. Wilson owns an auto collision repair shop - Wilson's Auto Collision Inc., from which he got the name of his team, Waci Racing - so he never got away from cars. But he didn't get back into racing until 1994, when he bought an old dragster.

Wilson bought his current car in October 2001, and in 2005, he finished the season ninth in the Super Comp class in Division 5. That same year, he also was runner-up in Bandimere's Super Comp series.

For now, Wilson, who is second in the standings in the Fineline 16 series at Bandimere, doesn't see himself stepping away from his time machine in the near future.

"I just can't get away from it. It's incredible," Wilson said. "When you get in that car and you roll up, and you and me right here, right now, and 1,100 horsepower - let's go!"