A good read about Drag Week...part I

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<TR><TD style="PADDING-TOP: 4px" valign="top" colspan="2">Drag Week 2007, Day 1 at Cordova</TD></TR><TR><TD valign="bottom" colspan="3">




<HR></TD></TR><TR><TD colspan="3"><!-- google_ad_section_start -->Day 1 of Drag Week 2007 is in the books, and for me so far it has been a strenuous exercise. Please allow me to backtrack to yesterday, test and tune day, to recount all the grisly details.

You may recall from my previous post that we lost the front bearing on the blower about fifty miles from Cordova on Saturday night. Joel and I had removed the belt and run the rest of the way to the hotel unsupercharged, and I had been pretty happy with how the car performed without the blower hooked up. Sunday morning we were up bright and early, ready to go to the test and tune, swap in the spare blower, and make some passes.

We drove the 10 miles or so to the track from our hotel, and arrived about 8:00. After registration for the event, I got busy tearing the damaged supercharger out of the car in order to replace it. But when I pulled the air cleaner assembly and hat off the carb, I got a very nasty surprise:

That little hunk of aluminum in the booster venturi is NOT supposed to be there. It was obviously a piece of the supercharger’s impeller. Next I looked straight down the throat of the carb, and was shocked to see a whole bunch more of the stuff sitting on top of the secondary throttle plates. Lucky I kept my foot out of it for the last 50 miles to Cordova! Here’s a photo of the shrapnel I poured out of the carb when I removed it from the engine:

It was indisputable now that the engine had ingested a large volume of shrapel. Yet, it appeared to be running just fine. I decided that I’d better do a thorough check of the motor, so I pulled all the plugs and the valve covers, and took my time examining the inside of the intake manifold. The intake was clean, and the valvetrain looked fine, with all the last adjustments just as I’d previously set them. The only indication of any problem was with the #4 plug, whose gap had closed up from .035 to about .020.

Back at the BP station on Saturday night, after pulling the blower belt I had removed the top of the supercharger’s inlet box to take a look at the impeller blades. Everything had looked fine. When I pulled the blower now, I saw the problem. The Vortech V7-YSi blower has two sets of impeller blades, in a double row configuration. With the blower laying on the ground, it was clear that while the outside row was undamaged, the inside row was chopped up pretty good. The impeller blades on the outside row were the only ones I could see by looking into the top of the inlet box when the blower was on the car.

Feeling like I’d dodged a bullet, I replaced the blower with my undamaged older unit, and reassembled the car. When I started it up, everything seemed find, and the new blower was very quiet as compared with the previous one. By this time it was around noon, and I finally was able to get into the tech line. The deadline for getting through tech to qualify for Drag Week was 2:00 PM on Sunday, so I'd made it with a couple of hours to spare.

Preparing for tech, I had a temporary NHRA drivers license since I hadn't received my permanent one in the mail yet. The chute was on the car, I'd changed the window net mounting location and also the submarine strap mounting location per instructions from the tech guy at Rock Falls two weeks ago. I'd never gone through tech with the car in this configuration before, and with just a temporary NHRA license I was afraid that the tech people might flag me for something that I'd done wrong on the chute or whatever. As it turned out, when the tech guy showed up he hardly looked at anything, not even my NHRA license! He just took a quick look at the car, checked my helmet and belt dates, and wrote 8.50 on the tech card. That number was important, because Hot Rod won't accept any times faster than the lowest ET shown on the tech card from Cordova.

From tech we went to the Hot Rod check in, where they did their own "street legal" tech. Here they were going to check for headlights, brake lights, turn signals, horn, and wipers. While waiting in line I snapped this photo of a nice 63 Galaxie and my car together:

Unfortunately the Gal didn't have an FE, but it did have a 514" 385 series engine in it, and from what the owner said it ran pretty good, mid 11s I think.

After waiting in line for an hour, I finally got through the Hot Rod tech. I got a chance to talk a little with David Freiburger while he was checking over my car. Joel knows David as well, from his involvement with the F.A.S.T. class, so it was fun for all of us to get caught up.

By now it was after 1:00, and the test and tune was underway, so back in the pits I got ready to make a pass with the car. This was going to be the acid test; did I really do any damage with the blower explosion? How would the car run? What affect would the change to the 3.50 gears have? How would my A/F be after jetting the carb down?

Only one way to find out, so I went up for a pass. The line wasn't too long, and before I pulled into the burnout box I made sure that my LM-1 was recording so that I got good A/F data. Immediately upon launching the car, I knew that going to the 3.50 gears had been the right choice. The car still spun on the line, but much less than it ever had before, and more importantly it stayed straight. As it turned out my 60' time for this run was about 1.54. Down the track I ran it to the 6200 RPM shift point, did my 1-2 shift and held my breath. Previously the car had tended to break the tires loose on this shift; not anymore. The car shifted clean and stayed straight, and I knew I was in the middle of a good pass. Then, at about 1000 feet - the car just quit pulling. It felt like I'd run out of fuel or something! I backed out of the throttle and coasted past the finish line. On the return road the car acted normally, and the slip said 10.14 @ 110 MPH. I pulled into the pits wondering what could have gone wrong. When I popped the hood, I was relieved to see that the blower duct tubing had come loose. Apparently I had forgotten to tighten one of the band clamps on the rubber coupling hose going into the hat. No wonder the car quit pulling.

I tightened up the clamp and let the car cool. I downloaded the log from my LM-1, but the data didn't make any sense. It didn't even appear that the pass was recorded properly, so I didn't get any A/F information. That was disappointing; I had really wanted to monitor that. I cleared the LM-1 memory, figuring I would just have to try again.

see part II...</TD></TR>

[GreekGod]

It was about 3:00 when I strapped back into the car to try again. This time, the leave was even better, and I ran a 1.51 60'. The car shifted clean and stayed hooked at the shift, and I was able to stay in it all the way to the finish line. I was very pleased with the pass, and couldn't wait to see the time slip. But, on the return road, when I went to put the car in first, I had no movement. What now?? I put it in second, and second seemed to be fine, so I rolled up to the shack to get my slip. 9.61 at 143 MPH! That was more like it. But what was the deal with the transmission?

Back in the pits, I pulled the transmission dipstick and smelled the fluid. Sure enough, it was burned. This was NOT good news. I don't know my way around automatic transmissions at all, and the fact that the fluid was burned meant that it probably wasn't something simple like linkage. After the blower carnage I'd already had to deal with, this was really getting me down. I began to wonder whether I would have to withdraw from the race. If that transmission had to come out of the car, I was certain that there was no way to get it fixed in time.

Some of the Drag Week regulars that I've gotten to know from previous years came by to help out. Bill Fowler, Brian Rock, Chad Reynolds, Steve Hoch, and several others offered assistance. The general consensus was that the Powerglide had burned up the band, because reverse and second were working fine. We went to see the TCI guy in the Comp Cams trailer, and he confirmed the diagnosis. The trans would have to come out to be fixed.

At this point I was considering either trailering the car back to Minneapolis, or trying to drive it all the way home in second gear and second overdrive. Some of the Drag Week guys were trying to pick me up, offering to help with the work on the transmission and to get it apart and fix it once it was on the ground, but I had no spare parts for it (and neither did the TCI guy), and getting the transmission out of the car involves removing some header tubes and the collectors, among other nasty jobs. One of the guys told Joel that the tower had the number of a local shop that might be able to help, so Joel went off to check on that. Chad Reynolds thought that maybe if we tightened up the band and changed the fluid that I might be able to limp through the week, so he and I crawled under the car to look for the adjustment. Unfortunately, we couldn't even see it, with the exhaust and the neutral safety switch in the way.

We had just crawled out from under the car when Joel returned with some startling news. He had gotten in contact with the local shop, an outfit called Layne Automotive and Speed, in Albany IL (For you guys who asked, I'll post more details on this shop later). They were located about ten miles from the track. He had spoken with Anthony Layne there. Anthony said to bring the car out; he had all the high performance Powerglide parts in stock, and if we helped he could fix the car that night!

Boy, what a stroke of luck to run into that outfit! The guys all helped me throw the pit stuff in the trailer, and we parked the trailer on the grounds at Cordova. Joel and I headed for Layne Automotive. When we got there, I was pretty impressed. Two other Drag Week cars were already there in two of the bays, and there was a dragster in a third bay and a local race car in a fourth! Obviously I'd come to the right place.

We met Anthony and he was in the middle of eating dinner, walking around the shop with a plate in his hand. He said that as soon as he was done, he'd pull out a nice old GTX that was in one of the bays, and we could pull the Mach 1 in and get to work. While we were waiting I downloaded the LM-1 log. I still wasn’t getting good data, but I found the problem; it was a loose connector, and so the A/F results were intermittent. From what I could tell, the car was running pretty lean on the last pass, around 13 – 14 to 1. I decided that if I got the car fixed and I was going to make a pass or two on Monday, I’d jet up and see what happened.

After a fifteen minute wait, we pulled the Mach 1 into the bay, put it up on the lift, and got to work. Anthony was spreading his time between several other jobs going on in the shop, so Joel and I started pulling the car apart. Another local racer named Rich stopped by; apparently all the guys in Anthony’s shop are Chevy guys, but Rich is a Ford guy so he was particularly interested in my car. He runs a 79 Mercury Zephyr at the track, and I think he said it was a 385 series engine with a Powerglide in it. He told us that Anthony works on a lot of racing Powerglides, so this boosted my confidence quite a bit. Layne Automotive and Speed sponsors Rich’s car, so he stops over to help out when they are really busy sometimes, and after a while he offered to go home and change, and come back to help work on my car!

By nine o’clock, with Rich’s help, we had the transmission out of the car and began to tear it down. This turned out to be an arduous process, because of the adapter used to mate the FE bellhousing to the Powerglide. The bolts in the adapter had to be heated with a torch to dissolve the red Loctite holding them in place before they would come out. They were allen head bolts, and the allen head wrench broke off in one of the bolts that was particularly tight, causing more trouble. I put in several calls to BradFORD from the shop, because he’d been the last one working on the transmission and he knew the ins and outs of the adapter system. Finally the adapter came free, and the transmission came apart. Sure enough, the band was toast, but so was the drum that it clamps around; the drum was all scored up. I figured I was done, but Anthony said he had a drum there, so everything was OK.

see part III
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[GreekGod]

part III



Anthony went completely through the transmission, putting it back together with the new parts. After checking everything, the best guess for the cause of the failure was that the band adjustment had been too tight. I had never touched the band adjustment, and neither had BradFORD when he had worked on it, so I have a bone to pick with Performance Automatics over that one. But, in any case, the trans was finally back together and ready to go back in the car at midnight. Here’s a photo of the shop at Layne Automotive, with the Mach 1 on the lift, the trans on the bench in the background, and the other cars in the shop:

Re-assembly seemed to go pretty fast, but it was still 2:30 AM before we filled the transmission with fluid, and started the car to warm it up. After topping off the fluid, we went for a test drive and everything seemed OK. At 3:00 AM I settled up with Anthony for what I thought was a very fair price, and Joel and I headed for the hotel after an exhausting day.

The alarm on Monday morning went off too early! There was a mandatory driver’s meeting at the track at 9:00 that we had to be there for, so we checked out of the hotel at about 8:15 and drove to the track. The driver’s meeting was kind of fun; I was one of about 25 guys who got a Drag Week “Repeat Offender” T-shirt, for making the event all three years. Freiburger also announced the number of cars in each class, and it turned out that there were four cars in my class. The heavy hitter looked to be a 69 or 70 Chevelle with a big block and nitrous; the guy said it was a “bottom 9” car, and I knew I would have some trouble competing with that. Freiburger went over the rules of the event, and then turned us loose to race.

I was not in a big hurry to get down the track, so I decided to take my time getting the car ready. I pulled the carb and jetted up one size in the front and back, and did a thorough check out of the car. Finally satisfied that everything was OK, I went out for my first pass around 11:00 AM. The weather looked threatening off to the west by this time, and I didn’t want to wait any longer.

The burnout and launch felt pretty good, and Joel said I lifted the driver’s side front tire at the launch. The car went nice and straight, but at the 1000 foot point or so suddenly the shaker scoop popped up! I backed out of the throttle for an instant, but then got back on it anyway, because I didn’t think the scoop was going anywhere, but nevertheless it was kind of a surprise. The pass was a 9.63 at 140 MPH, so I put that one in my wallet for safekeeping, and back in the pits I downloaded the A/F numbers. The data looked good finally, and the A/F looked like 12.3:1 to 12.5:1, which is still kind of lean for a supercharged motor.

Looking at the scoop situation, I found the problem pretty quickly. The shaker scoop has three attachment bolts, two in the back and one in the front. In order to save my stock shaker assembly, I had replaced the aircleaner top that the shaker bolts to with an aftermarket fiberglass reproduction. The front bolt had just pulled through the fiberglass, allowing the front of the scoop to lift. I stuck a fender washer on the bolt, and went out for another pass.

This time I didn’t have any trouble with the scoop, and the leave was pretty good, with a 1.47 short time. However, at 1000 feet again the engine popped or backfired for some reason, then continued running normally, I went 9.65 at 141.5 MPH. Maybe the engine did the same thing on the previous pass, and that contributed to the scoop coming up??

The weather was now beginning to look rather threatening, so instead of trying to make another pass, Joel and I got packed up and ready to go. I pulled the blower belt off the engine to minimize wear and tear, and prevent another blower catastrophe likeI’d experienced earlier. I turned in my 9.63 time slip at the tower, and found out that the guy in the white Chevelle in my class had gone 8.58!! Also found out that one of the other guys in my class had changed to naturally aspirated, so we were down to three. The third guy is one of the original Drag Week crowd, and he’s running a Caprice with nitrous, I think, but only going 11.60 or something. So, at this point I’m firmly entrenched in second place, with little hope of catching the Chevelle unless he breaks or hurts the motor or something.

Joel and I got on the road at about 2:00, saying goodby to several guys who had come to wish us well, including Bob Hasty and Tommy Aebly. It was starting to rain at this point, but it was only 185 miles to the next track, so I figured we could make it by 5:30 or so. Driving along through some fairly scenic roads, I was reminded of how much I love to drive this car cross country. Sure it’s loud, and it smells like exhaust, but the view over the shaker hood is always a thrill, and with the FE burbling along happily under the flat black hood, cruising down the road is just a joy. At the end of the week I’ll have had my fill of this for a while, but for now, the ride between tracks is just as much fun as the track time itself.

Towards the end of the drive, we hit a lot of congested roads, many with lower speed limits, and rush hour traffic in Rockford IL, so by the time we ran past the track and made it to the hotel it was 7:30. The car behaved beautifully through it all, so with luck the problems of Saturday and Sunday are behind me for good. Here’s the photo at the checkpoint for the first leg:

After arriving at the hotel, Joel and I grabbed dinner at a local restaurant, and after that the sleep deprivation from the previous night hit us and we crashed by 10:30. Naturally, I was up at 5:00 this morning, wide awake, which is why I’m writing and posting this now. Today I plan to jet up again, and will probably lose some MPH in the process, but I’ll feel safer with A/F in the 11.5 – 12 range. Then I’m going to add in some timing and maybe use my boost cooler to see if I can improve the times. My strategy at this point it to “test and tune” the car each day, trying to improve the times as I go through the week. If the Chevelle breaks, maybe I’ll win, but I’m not counting on it because the car looked pretty solid. So, I’ll just keep trying to better my times from track to track. If everything goes well today, tomorrow I’ll start with a little nitrous…

Jay Brown
1968 Shelby GT 500 Convertible, all aluminum 489" 1030 HP Supercharged FE
1969 XL Convertible, 460
1969 R code Mach 1, 706 HP 511" all aluminum FE, 10.457 @ 127.47, 2005 Drag Week Winner, Naturally Aspirated Big Block
2005 Ford GT, 2006 Drag Week Winner, 12.0 Daily Driver


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