Oh what a nice day for going to the track. After a rainy night, the weather was beautiful all day Saturday. After a very busy morning, Barbara, Outlaw and myself got to the track and unloaded. The car sounded good during warmup.
When they called the 1st qualifying time trial for Top Doorslammer, we took the right lane and made a pass. Everything looked good except the time, 5.822 @ 117 MPH. Not good at all. We must run at least 5.79 sec. in the 1/8 mile to get into the field.
Outlaw came back and said “Something is not right, the car sounds awful and the power is way down.”
After a inspection of several things under the hood, Outlaw decided to pull some plugs. Since I had had trouble with #6 and #8 last year, we looked at them first. They were very good. We continued and found #2, #3 and #5 plugs had gaps that were <.015″. All kinds of things ran though my head. Could I have forgotten to gap the plugs? Not very likely because NGK plugs come from the factory gapped around .025″. Could pistons be hitting the electrodes? This could happen if the engine was overrevved during the burnout. Well, whatever it was, we put three plugs in that had just 2 passes on them and were the correct heat range, NGK – 7.
The 2nd pass was the best pass of the day., 5.592 @ 121 MPH. It was a very good looking run. The Camaro carried the front wheels out to close to the 60″ marker.
The next two runs were aborted because the car went hard right after the launch. We think the new found power is lifting the front end too much and the Wheelie Bars are steering the car to the right. We will try tightening the front shocks to keep the front end down and try to get the wheelie bars equal.
