59. So close but no cigar

What a week this has been, our original plan has always been to try and get the car ready for the Spring Madness weekend at Shaky well the Sunday anyway. But one problem after another surfaced trying its s best to stop us running this weekend.

Steve had done so much work it's unbelievable, I took the batteries down on Friday Steve showed me what was to be another problem to sort out, this time it was the floor pan, the new gearbox has a deeper sump and fouls the floor pan so some modification is required.  I left Swindon with that 50 - 50 feeling but it was good to see the car just about back together again..

On Saturday I popped over to Shaky just to see some familiar faces and see what's going on and of course to listen to some loud engines...

Apart from new paint jobs I did notice new/ rebuilt engines..more on this later, well done to everyone looks like the off season was a success.

Plan B was just to get the car fired up on Sunday, Steve worked hard all day on this at around 1pm he rang to tell me that the good news the battery and starter turn the engine over and that he has oil pressure and as much as he can see all the electrics work apart from the Trans Brake...phone call to All on Monday I think., He was ready to try and start the car he just needed to know that the ignition system was working so he was going to turn it on and just check the last few bits out.

I threw my camera in the car and was about to leave for Swindon when Steve rang me back.."hold on" he said " can't get a spark" so I got back out of the car and waited for another phone call. An hour later Steve rang back, I have checked all the wiring everything is where it is supposed to be and he had been through the MSD problem solver and still no spark...the MSD box is toast.....

So that's it can't go any further Steve got on to Zannetec who are coming to check it all out this week if it can be repaired fine if not I need to source a new one..

An hour later Steve rang me back he had got our part time team member Al round ad he had taken the MSD box apart and found one of the tracks on a circuit board lifted and broken they fixed this got the power light back but still no spark!!!

We have also got an issue with the gear linkage which needs sorting gout before the car can drive...shouldn't be too much of a problem then sort out the trans brake then....who knows eh. All I know is I had no idea that changing an engine would take so long and be so involved Steve has worked 24-7 on this and I am dam sure his wife must be getting seriously pissed off by now, and the neighbours are really not happy about no parking spaces...the truck does take up a lot of room.

The 7 Second Club

To get back to what I was saying before, there has been a lot of talk on a popular forum about how many British built slingshots have run under 7 seconds I seem to remember the number 12 popped up, that's not a lot considering how many slingshots there have been over 50 years or so We know that Bob has two of these cars that have 7's his older Time Traveller car which was on pump gas and carbs but with a real healthy dose of Nitrous but not injected methanol, and the new Time Traveller ex Speed Demon. And of course there have been a few new slingshots built recently with powerful supercharged engines and we know that they and our Bob  are chasing the elusive "6" second run.

So to get back to the cars with the new/ rebuilt engines injected methanol engines that is, are they after chasing 7's, I will have to do some research on this as I can't remember if Hemi Hunter when running an injected set up was running Nitro or not or if it ran a 7 in this guise before the supercharged engine was put in..so could it be that "No" injected methanol slingshot has run a 7 answers on a post card please if I am right then......"The Race is on folks"