I spent most of Friday watching the weather and getting the car ready for racing on Saturday. I also put the car back on the scales and moved some weight around to see if I could get close to the recommended numbers the on-line calculators said my car should have for corner weights. No matter what I did, including removing one battery, I could not come close to those numbers.
I put everything back to the way it was and connected the anti-roll bar. At that point, I took a final set of numbers off the scales and put the car back on the floor. The anti-sway bar is set up with no pre-load on either side.
(Update – 9/16/15) The scaling never got done. All we did was weigh the car, after all work was complete. ALL of the improvements was the direct result of installation of the new rear shocks, new rear coil-over springs and the Anti-roll bar – 99%).
Saturday morning we loaded up and went to State Capitol Raceway. I had planned to make two passes and then decide what to do, but when I got to Tech., I paid for two days of Top Doorslammer before we had made any passes!
The first thing I did was to give “Outlaw” strict instructions on, “Be Safe First” and paying attention to how the car is reacting, second. We headed to the line for our first qualifying run. The car went straight as an arrow and the left front wheel did not come up over two or three inches off the ground. We ran 5.680 @ 118 MPH. We were happy!
The second pass was 5.656 @ 120 MPH, which put us in the #13 spot in Top Doorslammer out of 27 cars.
We won in the 1st round, when Dave Walker had a red light. That was the first time we had beat Dave in 4 tries! The car just kept getting better. We had a 5.608 @ 121 MPH. In the next round we lost when we had a -.002 red light, running another 5.605 @ 121 MPH to end our day.
We were super happy with the car and our day. Each pass was straight and Outlaw did not have to fight it at any point. The front tires don’t come up very much and our best 60′ time Saturday was, 1.257 sec.. That was about avg. for the whole weekend, with a best of 1.255 on one pass Sunday. That 1.255 is the best ever for this car. (I know others are much quicker, but we are just as happy with what we have).
Sunday we qualified with a 5.608 @ 122 MPH. We were still way down the ladder and had to run the #3 qualifier. We had another red light and had to buy back into Super-pro. We won two rounds of Super-pro, and right after crossing the finish line on the 2nd win, we had our hood split and we lost over 2/3 of the hood. We have no idea what happened. Everything was secure. The part that flew off broke off several of the springs on the Dzus fittings. I have never seen a failure like that. The fiberglass hood split from front to back on the drivers side and went about 50-75 ft. in the air. The other part was still attached to the car.
In the 5th round of Super-pro, we lost to a dragster when we had to run with a borrowed air cleaner from “Mr. Willie Beathley”. We thought the car would never run the numbers that it had been running, so Kevin had put 5.60 on the window for a Dial-in. I thought it should be higher, given the size of the air cleaner and no hood, and I changed the dial-in to 5.65 sec.. We broke out big time with a 5.599 @ 122.08 MPH! We were shocked! Both of us were wrong, but Kevin was closer. We were also very happy with the way the car ran all weekend.
After sleeping on it, and looking at the damage, and talking to my Crew Chief (Mrs. Barbara) and talking with Outlaw, we are going to order another 6″ Cowl Induction hood and put it back the way it was. We will be down a few weeks, but that is all we have to do, thank God! We prayed for safety and to go straight all weekend. Our prayers were answered…
Barbara shot a good video of the hood flying off, and we both took a lot of photos.
PHOTOS – Saturday 9/12/15