Thanks to all who sent congrats and best wishes.. What a fabulous experience for a gear head to rub elbows with some of the most accomplished builders in the industry.
The Y Block contingent was well represented with Ted Eaton and his team, my team, and some additional Y block guys who showed up to observe. As far as performance, SAM and Kaase routinely pull out all the stops to tailor their engines to win the competition, and it shows by the number of wins accumulated between them. An examination of their engines reveals what is necessary to make a score that can win.. For the rest of us that cannot have unlimited budgets, we work with what we have and try to tune for the best possible score. Ted did a remarkable job, using parts that are not exotic or one off, to post a VERY competitive score. Ted's engine could be dropped into a car and raced just as it is.. Not so for the two winners. I knew my effort would be challenged because I do not have aftermarket heads that flow a lot of air. I was pleased with how my engine performed as it mirrored very closely my test scores.. UNOH dynos are known to be stingy and every competitor was down from 20 to 50 horse from what they scored on their home dynos. My numbers were off the least of any that I talked to. On my home dyno I made 480 horse and 480 torque and an EMC score of 2183. On the UNOH dyno I made 462 horse and 467 torque for a 2129 score. The trick to making a good score in EMC is to find a combination that balances low end torque with high end horsepower. In a drag race engine you shoot for high end horsepower. In race trim this engine will make 510 horse at 6500 rpm but only 400 ft lb of torque at 3000 rpm..Since I pulled this engine from my race car I had to find a way to beef up the torque at 3000 rpm without killing all the horsepower at 6000. It was a given that I had to use my existing cam since solid roller cams for Lincoln Y blocks can't be ordered from J.C. Whitney. To do this I opened up the valve lash from .016 to .028 to make the cam seem smaller to the engine.. I also switched to a dual plane intake rather that the single plane I usually run in my race car. In 3 dyno sessions, I made over 100 dyno pulls, tested 5 intakes, 4 carburetors, 3 sets of headers, and a lot of spacers to come up with my combo.
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It was a great experience. I enjoyed myself greatly. It is stressful, expensive,and hard work to prepare and run an engine in competition,, but like so may things in motorsports, it is addicting.. If the rules are favorable in 2016 I will probably be back, hopefully a little more competitive that this yr,
