Great Weekend of Racing: The car ran perfect! After all that work, I could not have asked for a better performing engine on the first time out. Friday night was good, with the engine restricted to a Burnout and shift at 6800 RPM, we went through the 1/4 mile at 13.24 sec. while keeping the RPM to just over 4500 RPM as we crossed the line. After pulling the hood and inspecting a couple of plugs, we stopped at the end of the track on the return road and inspected two plugs, and we looked at the Exhaust Gas Temp. Monitor and decided to change jets in the front of our carburetor from 92, up too 94. The back was left at 102 jet size. We have a Power Valve in the front (which I am still not liking, but I am trying to get along with it). Timing was set at 36 degrees for all run this weekend.
On the 2nd pass I decided to go all out and see if it would stay in one piece. We launched at 4600 RPM and shifted at 6800 RPM. The car carried the drivers side wheel past the 60 ft. marker and Kevin had to “drive” it back into the groove. We ran a 9.020 @ 148.17 MPH! The Temp., was around 86 degrees and the humidity was over 70%. We had a 5.734 1/8 mile time, which was outstanding for out car and engine (all motor). That would have gotten us qualified in Top Doorslammer on a hot day.
All the setup for this engine is based on what we were running in the old 555 setup. When we fine tune to optimize the 565, we should do much better.
We made another adjustment after the first time trial on Saturday. We tightened up the drivers side front shock to stop the car from bringing that side up so much. This has been a problem in the past. All of the runs after the adjustment were much better, the car went straight and Kevin did not have to fight the wheel.
I am very happy with the way my engine turned out. On Saturday, the best we did was 5.69 in the 1/8 mile @ 120.11 MPH. The temp. was 82 degrees F. With the 555, we could never get below 5.81 sec. when the temp was above 80 degrees.
We qualified #13 out of 18 cars in Top Doorslammer. We had to run my friend Silas, Jr. and he cut a better light and ran close to his dial-in for the win. It was real close at the end, MOV: .0164 sec.
I pulled 6 plugs today and they all looked very good. There was even distribution and the engine had no oil or water leaks and sounded SUPER!