Out Early for 2018
Chris and I had a minimal number of changes to the car over the winter, so we were able to get out for the first race of the season in our area at the Midwest Promod Series X275 Race at Texas Motorplex. It was a mad thrash getting ready for that race, not so much on the race car, but getting some repairs done on the Motorhome before the race. Very much last minute, we got all loaded up and was able to leave by 10pm and drove all night to get to the track by 5 am. Luckily we didn’t wake up Gaylen Smith when we rolled in beside him in the pits at 5!
The race at Texas was more of a test and tune than anything for us. We found some problems in the fuel system with the regulator that was causing issues resulting in spinning most every pass, and learning what the car wanted with the new fogger system on it – we finally got it to hook when we went up for a test pass after losing 1st round in eliminations and went a 4.67 – it was good to finally get an A > B baseline finally.
Unfortunately when we got back home I learned we hurt three holes, lost ring tension in them. I’m guessing between the very low water grains and the fuel problem we were having we just got those too hot. So motor came back out, fresh rings in those three and we were ready to go again.
Tulsa’s Radial Revenge Race turned out to be a mess. I got the car working pretty decent on the front half of the track, but was a bit gun shy of putting too much timing in it with the GOW being down below 30. We made progress evening out the cylinders on fuel and timing, but in Q4 we hurt it because a plug wire got left off. Mistakingly I thought it was a bad crank trigger sensor which was pulling excessive timing out, we tried to find a replacement, messed around looking at other issues and never noticed the plug wire. Well, we were going to set out E1 since the car wasn’t up to snuff, then last minute thought oh what the heck, it’s just slow cause that cam sync sensor is out, it won’t hurt anything with extra timing out, maybe we’ll get lucky…
That was the big mistake, took it up again and ran it with the plug wire off (we assume), and promptly melted down #2 & #8, again assuming it was due to #1 plug wire off (2/8 are the nearest wires in the cap). We think it jumped spark to those holes firing them way to early. Anyway, melted down into the water jacket on #2 hole, and #8 wasn’t much better but with a big hole in the piston. We never should have ran it without pulling all the plugs again, would have caught it if we had. Oh well, that’s how it goes.
We’re now preparing Frank 2.0, the old Sniper heads are going out to be repaired, and we’re redoing the entire top end of the motor with new heads. Hopefully they will help pickup the car a bit, it was really needing a more up to date set of heads on it. So we’ll be down for at least a month or so rounding up all the parts for repairs.
