After a few years of hard charging racing where we as a team decided to reach out further and visit some of the tracks out east that our father used to race at, we burned our selves out. Racing, working full time and trying to balance time with family just was not working to well.
We decided to throttle back and run a few races, spend some time with family and recharge our batteries!
During that time, we had many milestones reached, graduations, grandchildren born, family members pass, retirements, people get sick and people get better.
Then Covid hit....
Like many people, this impacted the direction of our program. We had to reflect on where we wanted to go with it. Do we continue? Do we pack it up? Do we cut back to one car? What do we do?
During this time Craig and I decided that now was the time to build the shop we always talked about. With all of that, in the middle of this process, Craig, Steve & I were asked to help a fellow team out with one of their cars. That ended up in doing work on two other cars and helping two additional teams. Complete rewire of dragsters, new afterburner systems, updated safety shut off systems and more were accomplished. All the while the poor Invader and Avenger sat and collected dust.
So at the end of 2019 - beginning of 2020, we started the process of building the shop. What a project that it became! With Covid hitting, everything ground to a snails pace. Things that were usually a couple day turn around turned into weeks and months due to telework and permit delays. After a full thirteen months of planning, permitting, reviews, consulting and delays ground was finally broken in February 2021.
Then if that wasn't enough, we had the opportunity to purchase the tooling to completely overhaul the Pratt & Whitney J-60's from a friend. After much discussion, we made it happen.
While we are not completely done, 2022 is going to be an exciting new chapter for Eierdam Motorsports. Jet FX again will field the Invader and Avenger at tracks in the 2022 season, with Eierdam Turbine Systems with perform work on the J-60 and j-34's as well as jet vehicle maintenance and upgrades. ETS will be able to balance turbines, classifyvanes and blades, flow nozzles and more. We are in the process of building a test stand for the overhaul of afterburner pumps and some fuel control work for the future.
