As I write I have my feet up on the recliner and am half way through my first weekend off in some weeks. In seven days from now I will be watching the famous NitrOlympX Night Show whilst our photographers Kirstie and Julian are outside doing all the work, continuing what has been a prevalent theme recently.

Dragstalgia took place at Santa Pod Raceway in mid-July and I can't remember having had such a lazy weekend at the track in years. For the first time in its history Dragstalgia was unaffected by the weather and we got to see the event as it was always meant to be. Everything was a highlight: not one but three new Nostalgia Funny Cars took to the track, every one sporting a genuine body and not one of those wind tunnel-assisted newstalgia abominations. The Wild Bunch, who in my view are the world's leading exponents of true nostalgia racing, held a round of their Championship taking us back to the days of Lions. No mean racer herself, Sarah Howells backed up a slingshot dragster wearing an old outfit and I could have sworn that one of our Track Announcers - Colin Theobald, Barry Bohannon and Dave Gibbons who all did an excellent job - said that "Sarah's mother was buried in it". It transpired that the word was actually "Married"; I blame engine noise. The Supercharged Outlaws, the Cacklefest, the Outlaw Anglias, the Gasser Circus, the Nostalgia Fuel Altered Association, fire burnouts, the historic RWYB… there was something for everyone at Dragstalgia and every bit of it was perfect. The only downside was seeing Steve Carey take a high speed tumble off his Top Fuel Bike but it was quite plain from where I was sitting that Steve would have got up and walked away had the rapidly-attending safety crew allowed him to do so.

I have to confess that I spent a lot of Dragstalgia doing nothing but watching the action whilst Kirstie and Julian knocked themselves out in very hot sunshine photographing everything which moved on track, and a whole bunch of stuff which didn't move off track. Gijs and Susanna of our streaming service provider Doyousee.me, together with DYSM boss Maikel who was simultaneously broadcasting from Drachten, did all the work on the Webster Race Engineering / Nimbus Motorsport webcast which was viewed by some nine thousand nostalgia fans.

My contribution to the weekend was to visit the shutdown area to get a few parachute shots in the company of my good buddy Alan Currans, who runs the excellent Acceleration Archive web site - if you like your nostalgia then there's a site you really must visit at at theaccelerationarchive.co.uk. The top end crew made Alan and I very welcome, even finding me a couple of Gold Dust buckets to stand on so that I could see over the guardrail which is of necessity quite tall at the top end.


photo: VWs as far as the eye can see at Bug Jam


photo: We welcomed a number of Dutch visitors to the Mopar EuroNats

photo: The Garlick & Antoniou Nostalgia Funny Car made its debut at Dragstalgia

Back to Santa Pod the following weekend for Bug Jam, one of the three huge VW events which take place at the track each year. As is usual at VW events I was one of the oldest people there at 49. Julian, a VW fanatic, was in his element and he and Kirstie again worked very hard and produced pictures of such quality that the galleries could easily have been double or treble the size. As this event included Championship rounds for VWs, Outlaw Flat Fours, two UK National classes and Outlaw Anglias I did a bit more work but I didn't start until the RWYB closed at mid-afternoon on the Saturday. This weekend also featured the debut of the new Eurodragster.com embroidered sun hats, a generous gift from our US Correspondent Ed O'Connell. These hats were so good that HM Customs and Excise only reluctantly let them go after demanding money for their release.

The third visit to Santa Pod in three weekends was for the Mopar EuroNats which as its title suggests is a festival for all things Mopar and most enjoyable it was too. As they did last year, the organisers asked Eurodragster.com to webcast the event and we were very pleased to do so; Maikel and Gijs came over from The Netherlands and ran the webcast for us and they brought with them some excellent new features including a hand-held camera.

We were pleased to welcome a new photographer at this event; Grace Roaf, who works on the Heaven and Hell Pro ET team, will be photographing for our Event Coverage from the Open Sport Nationals at Shakespeare County Raceway in August and had a dress rehearsal on the Saturday of the Mopars. Grace presented us with 591 excellent pictures at the end of the day and her contribution helped to extend that day's gallery to our largest ever, at 315 shots. I have seen smaller galleries from those people who insist upon using motordrive and then emptying their memory cards onto Facebook unaudited, but believe me our Saturday gallery could have been bigger as pretty much every one of Kirstie's pictures was usable and even I had quite a good weekend with the camera.

Earlier on today I had the pleasure of informing Eurodragster.com readers Johan van de Sande, László Szabó and Patrick Oldenburger that they were the winners in our NitrOlympX contest and that they would be photographing trackside, enjoying VIP treatment in the Quartermile Club, and being given weekend tickets respectively. I must thank Christine Calwer and the Hockenheimring for putting up these very generous prizes. I am very much looking forward to spending the weekend alongside Track Announcer Benni Voss, an excellent host as well as a superb commentator, who carries an inexhaustible supply of Liptons Iced Tea.

The NitrOlympX is a tricky one for our Alamo Rent A Car-sponsored Event Coverage since it is all manual but timekeeper and all-round good guy Yasin Özer is planning to post qualifying lists and ladders on his own web site throughout the weekend so I may utilise the "split screen" reports which proved so popular at the Sweden Internationals. That will give me more time to post commentaries of Sportsman rounds and I will of course post full coverage of the Pro classes.

We have the full team at the NitrOlympX: Simon will be out in the pits getting notes and Kirstie and Julian will be trackside. And that's where I came in so that's where I will finish for now. We'll see you at Hockenheim, if not then stay tuned to Eurodragster.com and we'll bring you all the news.