Well, it’s been 5 months since I blew the motor at Buttonwillow. Let’s recap what’s happened since then… Early May I brought the Motor to Rob’s Auto Machine in Hayward. Took a couple of months for the rebuild to be completed. End of June I picked up the motor and was able to get it in the car (just sitting on the motor mounts, not hooked up). Then my usual work hell hit and I spent the next 2 months working 7 days a week; nothing got done on the car. Finally, end of August I get my life back. Started putting the car back together and got it fired up last weekend! Then I scheduled a dyno day at Rob’s to get it all tuned up. I had just gotten it so it would start but did not set timing or anything else. Luis and Steve from TRE Speed Shop (who did the tuning) welded in an o2 sensor bung into the exhaust and spent time changing jets to get the air/fuel ratio where they wanted it (right around 12.5:1 at WOT).
This afternoon I pulled the car out, washed it and finally put the hood back on (the last piece that was still off the car). So that’s it. Car is tuned and race ready again. I’ve signed up for the October Buttonwillow race. Looking forward to getting back out there. Unfortunately the car isn’t really any better than it was in April. I had hoped to develop the car over the last few months and maybe make some aero changes but instead the time/money was spent on rebuilding the motor just to get back to where I was. That’s ok though, if you read my earlier post about having Dave Brown run the car you know that I haven’t learned to drive the car to it’s current potential anyway. There’s several seconds on the table if I can learn how to drive better without changing anything on the car.
Over the winter I’m hopefully going to get the car lowered. Al and Control Freak Suspensions says he’s working on a drop spindle setup with Wilwood. Hopefully it will be ready soon and that will be the foundation for my lowering project…
here’s a picture of the car on the dyno yesterday. see you at the track!
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