It's taken me over a week to get down and write all this up mainly due to a visit form a family member to our place here in the Valencia region of Spain. Lets start with the FOP I was sat in front of my PC in my office from the test and tune day till the final race on Sunday. There was a reason for this as Spain became victims to the worst storms seen in the last 75 years, on the Costa Blanca alone we managed to get 24 inches of rain in five days that's nigh on monsoon levels of wet stuff falling on my already dodgy roof, there are plenty of videos on YouTube of this deluge local towns flooded including Benidorm and Denia, we are lucky as our place is set higher u in the village than a lot of the houses, I wont complain about the walk up that hill ever again. SO there I am in the middle of this biblical size extinction event watching racing at Santa Pod at Easter bathed in sunshine, something very wrong with that picture? But what an event PB's all over the place, Rebel in the 8.3's now listen up Brown boys if you want to go faster here is a little tip....paint your axle red shhhh! You backed off after that I can only presume that you either went out of your chassis tag or were saving parts, but what a belter of a weekend for you and some decent driving jobs, and ( I wont say this too loud" you beat Mark to the 160 mph well done. Mark tried to get his pilots licence even I jumped up out of my seat and winced at that one, glad you're OK mark and good to see the car back out the next day. Bob! what can I say an amazing run then disaster hope you get it fixed in time for Dragstalgia.. Great to see Bitchcraft running and turning all gears and to prove you don't need the fastest car to win congratulations to Keith. Getting itchy feet now. Such a great show put on by the Wild Bunch.
Back to our problem with the tow car the Dodge Ram I can see why so few people use Dodge engines in drag racing the parts are so dam expensive, a new set of pushrods, new set of lifters a few bolts and gaskets cost nearly as much as the last full rebuild on our Chevy motor, Steve ordered the parts and while he was waiting got on the with cleaning the heads and intake etc up and reseating the valves after de-coking them.
As you can see the 160,000 miles this engine has done has taken it's toll on parts it was a bit of a mess to be honest and to make matters worse this engine has LPG conversion on it, Steve tells me the wrong plugs were in it to start with and that the correct plugs are the same as the ones we use in the dragster and are a lot cheaper too,, good news for a change! As usual Steve got round to fixing all the problems and making good a lot of the repairs needed and the parts duly arrived in the post, the lifters went straight into a bucket of oil as Steve put the heads back on.
Less than two weeks ago it looked very much like we were going to have to sit out the Nostalgia Nationals as we wouldn't have a vehicle to tow the trailer with race car in it to the track it has taken a monumental effort by Steve to get the Dodge stripped, cleaned and back together again bearing in mind he has a full tie job and a family to look after and all his other commitments, well done son you shall go to the track!.
It's alive!
Steve and Dave will now have to finish off the odd jobs on the dragster at the track but at least they will get there now, back tot he dragster, as most of you know we have been struggling since day one to get he car down the track in a time and at a speed that should represent the engine we have but we have never got there. Over the last few weeks Steve has been doing some investigation and it would appear that first we have the wrong heads on, apparently off the shelf ally racing heads are fine for SBC's up to about 390ci but ours is 441ci and we need much larger heads to alleviate this problem a little bit we can fit and adapter plate between the hat and the tunnel ram to atomise the fuel better. Secondly Steve has been investigation the cam shaft he got onto Comp Cams and gave them our engine build sheet, what came back told us what we probably knew but was frightened to accept, Our cam shaft is no good for drag racing it is far too small, it is high lift short duration and is good for a stall converter of 3500 max, ours is 5,500 now that explains a lot, so Comp Cams have designed us a cam shaft for our engine to "wake it up a bit" it's a wonder we have managed to get the car to run as well as it has? none of this will be ready for the Nostalgia Nationals as Steve has been to busy sorting out the above problems so he is looking for consistency that weekend and no more damage please!!! Race safe see you at the track soon.
