But... we hurt the motor before I could get to elims... Boo!
While it wasn't easy getting there, this weekend we attended the WCHRA season opener in Outlaw 8.5. Our trouble started last month when we broke our blower shaking down the car. With the help of Procharger and Chris Alston's Chassisworks, we were able to get new blower and gear drive in hand by the end of last week.
With little time to spare, we got the blower and gear drive on the car and worked to modify our existing fuel, cooling and charging systems. In the end, we ended up ditching the radiator for intercooler water, ditching the alternator and fabbing a new bracket for the fuel pump drive. Cool... everything is set except the fact that the car will not start. After three days of pulling everything apart and putting it back together MULTIPLE times, we thought we tracked down the problem to a bad crank trigger pickup. We get to the track for TNT and run into even more problems with the car and trace it down to bad plugs and wires.
Off to the races...
Our first qualifying hit left us as the only team in the class able to get down in the 5's on the new Goodyear tire. Sweet! Number one qualifier and class record holder... if we could back it up. Back in the pits, we looked at the data and saw this graph. Two problems here, (1) something ate about 10 pounds of my boost and (2) there is huge flat / bad spot right smack dab in the middle of the run. Fixing the flat spot in the launch curve was mission #1. Looking at the data in the BS3, I was pretty sure we could smooth it out a bit and also add a bit of power down low. I made some changes to the tune-up and thought I had problem number one solved and moved on to the boost issue. Well, try as I did, I was unable to find any significant sources of boost lost and qual 2 was coming up quick.The next pass wasn't so good. Off the hit, the car bogged and lugged really hard to a 1.77 60' which was more than 3 tenths off our best, almost 3 tenths off our last pass and more than 3 tenths behind Mark Washington in the other lane. Then, about 2 seconds in, the car took off like it hit a stage of nitrous, caught up to the other lane by about the 330 mark and then really fell off at about 3.90 in. As I was rolling through the top, lights started going off, I had about 5 PSI oil pressure and the weekend was done.
Our guess is that we hurt the motor when the last blower seized and stalled the engine at about 7000 RPM and whatever bogged down the motor in our second qual run, finally broke loose cause a serious internal leak. Motor is out and hopefully the damage isn't too bad as we've got to go racing in just over a month for the WCHRA June race.
Wish us luck!
