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RACINGJUNK.COM

08 Begins

Vol. 17   No. 1

     Well we survived a cruel winter...looks like it was a rough one all over the country!  We slowly but surely made progress on the rebuild process during the off season from the damage we inflicted on ourselves last fall. 
     To recap:
On the last launch of the '07 season at Cedar Falls Raceway (one week before we were to head to Memphis for the NMCA World Finals) we broke the center section out of the rearend on the FlashBack.  We also managed to bend the rear housing, break the driveshaft, the transmission case, and even the bellhousing.  We took the engine out of the car and ran up to Midnight Machining so we could check it out to see if it survived the carnage or not as well.  After a full day of running the engine on the dyno we were satisfied that the engine was okay but we weren't satisfied with the power level that we had...so we decided to tear down the engine and make some changes there as well.
     Jim from Diamonds Body Shop was allowing us to work on the car at his shop which was a true blessing as is shop is heated and has plenty of room to be able to really work on the car...unlike my garage where there's less room than heat and there's no heat at all!
     The rearend assembly went down to Doug at Quick Performance for them to evaluate and the transmission went over to Transmission Rebuilders for them to assess the damage done to that piece.
     With everything removed from the car (engine, transmission,rearend, rear suspension) Scott and Jim decided that it's be a good time to redo the engine compartment as it was getting abit 'grungy' looking.  So all the wires, lines, hardware, and brackets were removed and the paint flew.  Then Scott decides that he'd had enough with my crude wiring and he went about rewiring and rerouting the wires so that the engine compartment really looks alot cleaner.
     Then all the front suspension came off the FlashBack along with all the brakes...Jim (Diamonds) and Doug (Quick Performance) conspired against me and convinced me to put a rear disc brake setup on the car with the new rearend assembly so then I, of course, decide to put a matching setup on the front of the car...it never ends!
     Scott, Dwayne, Jim, and I were at Jim's shop most weekends picking away at our "to do list" which now included some fuel line work, new seatbelts, new window net, new rear shocks, new control arms and spindles for the front suspension, and other such things.  It seemed that everytime we tried to get something done, something else came up or the weather was horrible!  I lost track of how many times I went home through a snow storm...winter is not my favorite time of year if I haven't mentioned that yet.  The weekends not spent at Diamonds we tried to get up to Joe's (Midnight Machining) and pick away at the engine projects going on.  Not a big list but the plan was to mill the heads just a bit to bump up the compression ratio and get some more power out of the engine.  Joe also applied some new ideas to the valve and checked the valve springs out for us.  A new set of "beefy" pushrods were added in the mix and a new set of valvecovers were ordered and sent down to Phoenix Specialty Coatings to be powder-coated and Scott will custom engrave them as soon as we get them back.
     We've worked out the schedule for the Midwest Open Comp Series for the '08 season at Cedar Falls Raceway and we have a few national events we'll try to attend with the NMCA folks once again...we had to miss the Bowling Green, KY race one more time and that really bums me out as that is one of my favorite facilities to race at.  We have a bit of a shudder problem with the new front brakes and it just wasn't safe enough in my opinion to get into a competition situation with the car (we just installed a more heavy-duty setup yesterday so we should have that corrected now) so we'll see how things are sitting for the next NMCA event at Route66 in a month or so.
     Despite the brake shudder problem we did make some shakedown passes with the car at Cedar Falls Raceway.  The shutdown area at CFR gives us plenty of room to coast and drop some speed off the car before we really have to get on the brakes otherwise we wouldn't have made any passes until we corrected the problem.  The first weekend out we made a soft pass to check things over and then made three pretty good runs...a 10.26  / 10.27 / 10.28
Now, considering that all of last season we were beating our heads against the wall to hit a 10.2 anything this was a bit of a victory for us.  The downside of hitting three 10.20 runs in a row was now we were abit disappointed that it wasn't a little quicker...I guess we get a little greedy.
     Our next outing, after making an adjustment to the brakes (which still didn't correct the problem) did little to erase that feeling even though we made runs of a 10.13 / 10.16 / 10.16 / 10.12 respectively.  Yes they were better times and we were extremely happy with passes in the 10 teens...the problem was that those 10.16 passes we had made some changes that we thought would get us a run in the 10.oh range...after those two passes we went back to the baseline setup and ripped off the 10.12 pass...running great but still getting greedy I suppose.
     While this weekends races got rained out we put the new front brake setup on as we continue to try and get that shuddering corrected before the next race comes up...We'll keep ya posted!