NEWS

25th NOVEMBER 1999

As you all know, we had a very successful race meeting on October 30. We ran a PB , track record, won the meeting and were going into Round 1 of Top Doorslammer in Melbourne full of confidence and expectation. Hang on a minute - this is Drag Racing, the sport of extreme highs and lows.

While assembling the motor, three days before the car was to be shipped to Melbourne, we found a hairline crack in the no.2 main bearing support in the block. Seems like we may have leant on it a bit much when we ran the 6.40. This is not a major problem if you have a specialist welder nearby and a few days up your sleeve. Unfortunately Perth is a million miles from everywhere (when it comes to drag racing anyway) and does not have such luxuries, so the block had to go over East to be fixed. Being aluminium, it can go out of shape easily if not heated/welded correctly. The process takes a few days so we knew we wouldn't get it back in time for the next meeting.

Fortunately we had a new block on order which was due to arrive any day. Murphy's law prevailed and, you guessed it, the new block didn't arrive in time to enable us to run the Nov 13 Top Doorslammer round Calder, Melbourne. That was OK because we had the 20 November meeting at Ravenswood to look forward to - if the block arrived in time.

Nov 17 the new block arrives. Over 100 man hours of effort (between five of us) saw the new motor fired up for the very first time at 1.45am on raceday. We worked on it after work each day - the 17th (midnight), 18th (2.00am) and 19th (2.30am). You may ask why is so much time needed - after all isn't the block basically the same as the old one? Yes, that's true but the main problem is the technology and parts are all American - you just can't go down the street and get what you need. You generally have to make/change components to suit. This takes a lot of time.

8 hours after finishing the car we headed down to the track after a few hours sleep. Everything is fine at that stage.

Run 1 - First qualifier (Left lane) - Car launched real fast with a 1.07sec 60' time. The clutch locked up hard half way through first creating a massive amount of tyre shake. I had no choice but to abort the run.

Run 2 - Second qualifier (right lane) - Thinking we'd gone too soft on the tune up (ie the engine was not producing enough power to drive through the clutch) we stepped it up a bit. Wrong! It shook in 1st again, I backed off hit 2nd, it shook again, backed off hit 3rd and powered to the end of the track. I won the race against South Australian Dave Koop with a 7.99 @ 198mph but it was an awful run.

Back at the pits we replaced a broken valve spring and fired it up. It was not right. No 1 cylinder was spitting fuel and a bit of smoke - oil was obviously getting past the rings. We ran out of time to check it out properly so we opted for an early night rather than risk hurting the motor any further.

The workshop examination found the motor was detonating and had pinched a couple of rings. Apart from that the rest of the car has come up fine. The tyre shake had also altered the timing which didn't help.

With a couple of adjustments we are confident we will be back on track for Round 2 of Top Doorslammer on December 4. It is at Ravenswood, which is handy plus ANDRA award double points for the WA rounds (to attract guys from the east) so it will be a great opportunity to make up lost ground in the series.

Stay tuned ...