Drago 4

I had promised Chris Kobel's son a drag race with our Demon 98s, but since I broke mine by accident, I had to scramble to come up with something different. I ended up choosing my freshly-painted Drago since it was a similar 4" head end dual deploy rocket, albeit with bigger fins and no boattail—no way I was gonna win this one. No matter, as I had never flown a K805G and wanted to give it a try. The Drago performed well, and the flame was a brilliant green. Dual deploy landed me about a half mile to the west.

James had promised I could use all of their high waiver, so I figured it was a great opportunity to let the Drago stretch its legs again. I had pre-prepped as much as possible, and even though I didn't arrive until late on Friday afternoon, the weather was so beautiful I went ahead and added the tracker and headed to the pads. The 5 grain 75mm motor did not disappoint, vaulting the rocket from the pad on an arrow-straight trajectory to just north of 15,000 feet. The tracker signal jumped at apogee and I started scanning for it on the way down. Eventually, we heard a pop right behind us, and the rocket touched down under main next to the stop sign at the entrance to the site. It doesn't get any better than that!

Since I had my Drago custom-made with a 76mm hole, I wanted to take full advantage of it at the earliest possible opportunity. I've always had a theory that the 3/16" fins on Wildman Extreme kits are overkill, and I figured the big mudflaps on the Drago would be a reasonable test case to prove this out. A 5 grain blue motor was the weapon of choice. Fellow racer Neal was on the mic and was a little bit in disbelief that this would go well, but after a five count the Drago bulleted from the back row on a blue flame well over the length of the rocket. We lost it against the very high cloud deck, but the tracker was reporting happy beeps all the way down, and I was able to quickly and easily pick it up just across 247 at the north end of the lakebed. Cool flight.

We had a GREAT Wildman drag race at this launch. Under the new rules, we couldn't bang 'em all at once, so instead we did heats of two, waiting until the previous ones were recovering safely before flying the next pair. Thank you to Tim for the SMOKIN deal on these 4" Dragos and thank you to Charlie (ATGM) for the bonus bucks on K850 Dark Matter motors! I had ten on special—five flew and the other five were gone minutes after the race was over, so this was excellent marketing :) Mine topped the pack, but I cheated (76mm hole = less fin tab weight) so Wayne Comfort was declared the altitude champ. Dual deploy landed me just at the west end of the flight line and recovery was easy just before dark.