We had a bit of a disaster at the Nostalgia Nationals in that some of the changed we made had no impact on our performance or lack of it, but as of a lot of meetings this year we were hampered by the weather. As any drag racer knows the one thing we can never get enough of is.....Track Time. So we left that meeting scratching our heads, I said to Steve that it must be something stupid and simple that is hampering us something we have overlooked and is probably staring us in the face.
Thanks to Ray Andrews for this photo
I must point out before we go any further that we have received an enormous amount of help, support and advice from our fellow drag racing community and I can't thank everyone enough but what Steve did was to forget everything he has been told and he went back tot he books and installation instructions read through them all again as if a novice and starting all over again from scratch. At the same time we found out that the Wild Bunch had been invited to bring some cars for demo purposes to the Retro Show, it was never our intention to do any more meetings only Dragstalgia but we needed track time so I let Claire know of our interest and low and behold we got the invite, at the same time Steve rang me to let me know that he thought he has found our problems...brilliant! So Steve set off the night before and did some work on the car in the back of the truck in the lorry park.
So we get to the Pod service the car and set up camp, the sun is shining we are in a good mood, I then sat Steve down and asked him what he had found....
...first of all the barrel valve this controls idle and the point where the main jet takes over and has to be set right or..well nothing works right! because ours is on the other side of the hat from normal?? the valve is effectively the wrong way round so has to be adjusted backwards so to speak and the leak down tester we are using to set the valve is basically a compression tester so has to be read differently, So we put all this right went out for our first run and netted a low 10 at 127mph this speed is getting annoying as it seems to be the brick wall we can't get through. So a change of pill a large change done on purpose to see if it just the fuelling that is causing our problem so out for another run and again a low 10 at 127mph this time I took not of the rev counter we were still not getting anything over around 5 -5500 rpm we were missing 2000rpm. more head scratching. At this point I went and enlisted the help of Mike Oates driver and tuner of the Comp Eliminator slingshot Fiddle Head, lovely guy who will go out of his way to help other racers, he went through some basics with Steve and the thing they found out was we wee running too lean on the main pill, where we thought we too fat and was trying to lean it out we should have been richening her up..
So more work was done on the car and at this point after some more reading Steve found out that when we changed form the Mallory dizzie to the MDS dizzie there was a green loop wire that needed to be cut /disconnected as this could cause ignition problems, so having now put all this right we fired the car up....not a chance she wouldn't start so checked for a spark..none re-connected the green wire still nothing, more head scratching...then Steve noticed the HT lead had fallen of the coil pack..ok so this was a bit funny but also this would come back to haunt us later. so fired her up she sounded brutal all was good we warmed her up ready for next run all excited but...yep the weather changed and we had the most incredible downpour and thunder storm that I had seen in many years so that was it for the day as far as racing was concerned.
So Sunday arrived and so did summer at long last, we got the covers off the car and warmed her up we were scheduled for four runs today, but the really cool thing was we were towed down the old fire up road..bloody brilliant, now the track was very marginal in fact the pit side lane was slippery this was due to the number of street cars running treaded tyres we were told so the first run we were up against Terry Clifford and his Ratcatcher team we took the better lane for this run and then we swap for the next run, so burnout completed and...no gears well no reverse so was shut down and towed back but not before I watched Terry snake and drift his way up the track. What we thought had happened was the on board battery wasn't charged up enough to hold the trans brake solenoid in hence no reverse. so back in the pits, big charger connected to the on board battery, trickle charger put in the cupboard.
Next run again against Terry this time we got the slippery lane..so burnout, she actually felt like she was trying to pull and we got lots of smoke hmm good. Launch..yesterday we did two second gear launches today we hit it in first no trans brake just a foot brake launch and the wheels came up immediately and she rode the wheelie bar but I had to peddle three times ass we were all over the place I changed into top and then floored her again at around the 330 foot mark and she pulled like a train, took me by surprise to be honest but I did remember to have a quick look at the rev counter 6500rpm through the lights..that's a bit better.
Terry's team came to the top of the track first and they were cheering and shouting but..it was for me apparently I had done an amazing driving job and still carded a 9 second run at over 144 mph, my team turned up big grins on their faces and a shout of " about f****** time" it has taken nearly two years to get the car to run faster than 140mph well done guys what a team, never give up never surrender!!!!!
We even had time to fit the new chute, so looking forward tot he next run again a strong burn out this time up against Andy Stones in his Kawasaki powered dragster,stopped after the burn out and found I had no neutral no reverse only second gear i tried to shake her loose but no go so I took the decision to driver her off the end of the track and get out of the way, what we found out was the problem had nothing to do with the battery we had a dodgy connection on the trans brake relay, so we sort of fixed that for the next run (bodged until we had time to do a decent fix) went out for our last run full of hope and expectation, again up against Andy, a stonking burn out from yours truly had to be pulled back as the dodgy relay fix hadn't worked too well, staged and I was going for it this time read the lights well left Andy for dead front wheels came straight up and then....she died, cut out lost power, I pulled over tot he side of the track just in case I was leaking anything at around the 330 foot mark I stopped and had to be rescued by the Pods quad, got back to the pits and found the HT leas on the coil had fallen off again (yeah that one again)
We had a great time at the Retro Show made some new friends had a laugh and some fun and most importantly we have now got the car doing what we want not what it wants, we have found our tuning window..we hope!!!! now looking forward to Dragstalgia to do it all over again.."bring it on"
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