Drag Week ended early for me this year. Here's the story:
Joel and I rolled into Heartland Park on Monday morning at 8:00. We got the car off the trailer and I got to work right away on making some adjustments to the four link setup, plus taking care of a few other minor items. One of these was tightening the rear view mirror bracket. As mentioned previously the new windshield I'd put in the car had a rear view mirror mount for a slide on mirror, and my replacement factory mirror wouldn't fit. BradFORD had found a mirror that would work at his place, and brought it to his shop and Saturday where we did the alignment. The mirror was from a 2000 Chevy Venture van! I figured I'd give that mirror the ride of its life LOL!
At 8:50 Joel took off with the truck and trailer to park them in the impound lot, and I headed up to the grandstands for the driver's meeting. The usual cast of characters were there, including David Freiburger who is editor in chief of Hot Rod, Keith and Tonya Turk, Rick Johnson from Gear Vendors who was the major sponsor of the event, Jack from Rocket Brand Racing fuels, and the Primedia Publishing support group who put the whole event together. Conspicuously absent was Rob Kinnan, who is the former editor of Hot Rod but is no longer employed there. Freiburger announced that there were a total of 177 cars registered, making this the biggest Drag Week event ever, and when he asked all the new drivers to raise their hands, it was a very large number. Pretty cool, really.
The driver's meeting broke and the track opened right away, so Joel and I went back down to the pits to get ready to race. After some last minute details I started the car and we rode up to the staging lanes, where of course the lines were rather long. The car didn't start all that easily again. Up in the lanes, after a couple of minutes I had to restart and pull the car ahead, and it started doing the same thing again; popping and backfiring, and refusing to start. We pushed the car ahead a couple of times, but after it refused to start repeatedly we pushed it off to the side of the staging lanes in the grass to try to figure out what was going on.
Scott Clark was there again on Monday, and his timing is impeccable; he rolled up in his SUV just as we were trying to figure out what to do next. He watched the fuel pressure gauge on the injector rails while I cranked the engine. Normally when you turn the key, the EFI box tells the fuel pump to turn on for about five seconds, and then it shuts it off and waits until it sees an RPM signal. When it sees this, it knows the engine is cranking, and it turns the fuel pump back on. What was happening on my setup was when the engine was cranking, the EFI box was leaving the fuel pump off. The RPM signal being reported by the EFI box was not consistent when the engine was cranking. We'd thought that we'd solved that problem yesterday by removing the connector to the crank sensor, because yesterday after that everything seemed fine. But now the engine was acting up again.
Scott has an oscilloscope on his computer, and he wanted to look at the signal from the crank sensor, so I crawled under the front of the car and peeled back the tape over the wires we'd soldered yesterday. We hooked up the scope to those wires while I cranked the car. The scope showed a perfect signal from the crank sensor. It just didn't make sense that the EFI box wasn't seeing a good signal.
With all the trouble we'd had starting the engine, Joel and I decided that we could be dealing with a bad set of plugs that was exacerbating the situation. We changed them, and sure enough they all looked pretty black. This was certainly contributing to our starting problems.
By now it was after 11:00 AM. I needed to get a pass in, so what we decided to do was push the car up to the staging lanes, and then use a boost box to make sure it would start once it was up there, the working theory being that maybe the voltage drop during cranking was keeping the EFI box from seeing the crank sensor's signal. We pushed the car back into the staging lanes and made our way up to the starting line. One car back, I cranked the engine, and after a couple of tries it ran. I finished strapping in and got ready for the first pass on the new car.
To me there were two question marks that this pass was going to answer. First, was the four link setup correctly; would I get decent traction at the line? And second, was the engine really down on power, or was the dyno not giving me the right data? I figured the MPH number would tell the tale on this. The engine when it was in the Galaxie ran about 143 MPH, and the Galaxie weighs 700 pounds more than the Mustang. Using the numbers from the Moroso "dream wheel", this translated to just over 150 MPH in the Mustang. I had the parachute mounted on the back of the car just in case.
This was the first pass on my new tires, so I did an extra long burnout, and held it coming out of the water. I wasn't familiar with the track, so when I came out of the box I went part the starting line by a few feet, and had to back up before I could stage the car. But finally I was staged and ready. I foot braked the car at about 2500 RPM and launched on the last yellow.
I cut a pretty good light (.008 I think), and the car launched with no wheel spin and went right down the track. Question 1 answered. But the car was slow; I could tell right away it didn't have the power that the Galaxie had. I stayed in the pass the whole way, and ran 10.005 at 134 MPH. I should have trusted my dyno; the engine was just down on power.
Back in the pits I was at least somewhat relieved that I had gotten a pass in for the day, and that I finally had the answers to some questions that had been bugging me for a while. On the way back from the track the idle on the injector setup had gone way up, so I figured I had a linkage problem and started tracking that down. It looked like some of the engine compartment wires were blocking the throttle linkage, so I tied those out of the way. Then I reset all the throttle butterflies, since I hadn't done that after installing the engine in the car. Next I had Joel hold the pedal wide open while I looked at the butterflies, and what do you know, I did not have wide open throttle! The butterflies were only about 10 degrees off vertical, but that's enough to make a significant difference in power. Not enough to account for 150 HP though, and of course I'd checked for wide open throttle on the dyno. In any case, I readjusted the throttle cable to make sure I could get WOT, and reinstalled the injector stacks.
Joel had brought burgers and fries from the concession stand (I love track food LOL!), so we sat down in the shade of a trailer and had lunch. They were keeping the track open later than usual today, so I had the opportunity to make a second pass. I figured I should be able to get the car into the nines with no trouble, having fixed the issue with wide open throttle. We also pulled the parachute off the car; no need for that given the first pass. Joel and I are now referring to the parachute as "The Pipe Dream" LOL!
Around 1:45 or so I went up. The car started just fine in the pits, and Joel rode with me to the head of the staging lanes, which were now pretty empty. I got all the gear on and got strapped in, and again the car started fine and I rode right up to the starting line, where they waved me into the burnout box. I did the same burnout as last time, staged the car, and left again on the last yellow.
This time, I was clearly up on power, and the car broke loose shortly after it left the line. It continued to have traction problems all the way down the track, and after veering from one side of the lane to the other a couple times I finally got out of it at 3/4 track and coasted across the finish line, running something like a 10.40 at 105 MPH. Looks like I have some shock tuning to do on the car to get it to run correctly down the track; it seemed to hook on the line OK, but broke loose later.
Back in the pits we decided not to try another pass today, because it was going to take some time to get the car packed up and ready to go. I took my time slip up to the tower and handed it in. I found out that I was running in second place in the class, only .05 seconds behind a '95 Camaro driven by a Drag Week veteran named Clark Rosenstengel, so for sure I was in the race. I figured if I could get the car to hook and make a decent pass at the rest of the tracks, I could win the class again this year. If, if, if...
Joel and I got packed up and ready to hit the road. Keith and Tonya Turk and David Freiburger came by to ask how things were going, and we gave them the update. It was nice to see that they were all very interested in the car, and wished us luck. Packing everything in the car and trailer took us quite a while; here's a photo of us getting packed, with a bunch of stuff still on the ground around the car:
Finally we were ready. I started the car and it fired right up, but ran really, really, rough. What now? My A/F readings were astonishingly rich all of the sudden, something like 9.5:1 at 2000 RPM. The car seemed to idle OK, but it was obviously running rich.
We screwed around with this in the parking lot for a while, but nothing had changed on the tune, so we decided to hit the road and see if it would just clear itself out. I was beginning to suspect the plugs again, but why the engine would suddenly be burning up plugs I had no idea. As we drove down the road we spotted an O'Reilly's auto parts store, and decided to stop and change the plugs.
When I got under the hood of the car with the new plugs in my hand, I immediately saw the problem. I had forgotten to plug the wires back into the air temperature sensor after I'd changed from the injector stacks back to the air cleaner setup. I called Scott Clark to ask about this, and sure enough he said that with the sensor unplugged, the EFI unit thinks the air temperature is -40 degrees! It was richening up the mixture to try to compensate, and this was why the car was running so poorly.
While I had Scott on the phone I asked about bypassing the EFI box's control of the fuel pump relay. If it wasn't delivering the correct signal to the relay, I figured I could just bypass that control and ground the relay wire directly, to keep the fuel pump always on while the engine was running. Scott agreed that was a good option, so in the O'Reilly's parking lot I cut the control wire for the ems-pro to the fuel pump relay and grounded it to the battery terminal. This way, the fuel pump would always be on with the key on, so it wouldn't be cutting in and out while I was cranking the engine, and making the car more difficult to start.
After getting done with this we fired the engine, and it started right up and after clearing a little excess fuel, seemed to be running normally. I reset the idle for 800 RPM, but then Joel and I discovered another little fuel system anomaly. The fuel pump is controlled by an Aeromotive fuel pump controller unit. The way this unit works is that a tach signal wire goes to the controller, and below 3000 RPM the fuel pump essentially spins at a slower speed, saving wear and tear on the pump. Over 3000 RPM, and it goes to full speed. There is a switch on the dash that I can throw that bypasses the speed control, and keeps the pump running full speed all the time. I had started the car with the bypass switch on, and the car started and the fuel pressure read a steady 45 psi. But when I switched the bypass switch off, the engine almost died, and the fuel pressure bounced around like crazy from 20-30 psi, which is really not enough. Maybe the Aeromotive controller wasn't working correctly or something? We didn't know. We decided to just run with the pump full on all the time, so I switched on the bypass switch and got ready to leave the O'Reilly's parking lot.
Leaving the parking lot turned into quite an adventure. I had to back the car out of the lot, and the trailer is so short coupled that it is tricky to back it up. In addition, with the Powerglide (oops, I mean C-2) trans, you have to hold the trans brake button down to keep the transmission in reverse. The button is on my steering wheel, so quick wheel movements are hampered by the requirement to hold down the button. Back and forth I went in the parking lot with the trailer, probably 6-8 times, moving the wheel from lock to lock, before I finally had weaved my way out and could get going forward again.
Going down the road, I now noticed a new problem. I had probably 75 degrees of steering wheel travel where the wheel was not steering the car! I could keep it under control, but suddenly developing that much steering slop was not good news. I figured it had to be the result of my antics in the O'Reilly's parking lot. We had a mandatory check point coming up, so we stopped for that and took a picture:
Still thinking about the steering, and needing gas, we pulled into a gas station a mile or so down the road, and after filling the tank Joel looked under the car and watched the steering linkage while I turned the wheel. Joel said that the rack was not staying stable in the car, and was moving back and forth as I steered, causing the slop.
Well, this was not good news. I sure wasn't going down the track with steering that wasn't up to snuff, and I didn't want to drive the car very far either. Across the street there was another gas station with a canopy that offered some shade; it was hot, and I didn't relish the idea of crawling under the car to fix the steering with the sun beating down on me. We drove the car across the street and parked under the canopy, then jacked the car up and took a look.
The Fatman front end setup uses a couple of clamps with split Delrin bushings to hold the steering rack in place. The clamp bolts were loose, allowing the rack to slide back and forth in the clamps. In addition, the Delrin bushings had come nearly completely out on the passenger side; the lower bushing was still in place, but the top bushing was gone. Looking at this, I thought we were sunk right there, but then as I continued to look around under the car I saw the second nylon bushing sitting on top of the K-member! So, at least the pieces were all there to put the rack back in its correct position.
Tightening the bolts on the driver's side was no big deal, but putting the Delrin bushings back into place on the passenger side turned out to be a big headache. Joel and I screwed around with this for a good hour while lying under the car, but we finally got the bushings back into position and got the passenger side clamp bolts tightened. At about 6:15 we pulled out of the gas station. We still had about 220 miles to go to get to the next track.
Within about 10 miles the directions put us on Interstate 70 going West. Down the road as I was driving I noticed the engine wasn't running quite right, and a glance at the A/F meter showed that as I rolled into the throttle the car started running pretty rich. I had never had the opportunity to tune the ems-pro on the road, so at a convenient exit Joel and I swapped spots, and I tuned the VE map while he drove. Pretty soon we had the car running nicely under all the different freeway load conditions, and I settled in for another 40 miles or so of driving down the freeway before our next exit.
Soon thereafter, I began to be concerned with the engine's water temperature and oil pressure. They were both moving, and in the wrong direction. Oil pressure was going down, while water temperature was creeping past 200 and approaching 210. With the killer radiator I have in this car, and at freeway speeds, this was not an expected result. After another 10-15 miles, we decided we'd better pull off at the next exit and look under the hood.
As soon as we were off the freeway, the exit turned into a gravel road. We were in the middle of nowhere, pretty much. We pulled down the exit ramp and stopped on the road after going back under the freeway, and took a look. It was getting dark now. I looked at the sight tube on the front of the oil pan, and there appeared to be water in the oil. As a check, I pulled a spark plug tube up out of the valve cover, and sure enough I saw white streaks of watery oil on the tube.
So, the Moroso ceramic sealer had not held under the rigors of the drag strip and drive. We still had at least 150 miles to go to the hotel for the night, and then four more days of drag racing. Our upcoming drive from Amarillo to Tulsa was 440 miles. To me, adding more of the Moroso ceramic seal to the engine and trying to keep going was just not a realistic option. Joel agreed; we threw in the towel on Drag Week 2011 right there.
We decided that we might be able to make it back to Topeka for the night if we changed the oil and added water to the car, so we spent the next hour or so working on that. When we finally pulled the radiator cap off the radiator I could see we were down about a gallon, but fortunately we had enough water in the cooler to top it off. Here's a photo of the car as we worked on it on the gravel road:
Finally we were ready. The car started right up, and we were off going east on I-70. But the oil pressure just wouldn't hang in there. It started off at 60 psi when we got on the freeway, but gradually dropped. When it got down to 20 psi and I started hearing valvetrain noise, we pulled off on the next exit.
I put my AAA card to use and within 45 minutes a tow truck was there. He couldn't take the trailer, so we pulled all the real valuable stuff out of it and chained it to a roadside sign; we will pick it up this morning after we get the truck and trailer out of impound at Heartland Park. (I hope no one steals it tonight; I don't want to lose The Pipe Dream.) The tow truck hooked us up by the back wheels and took us back to the hotel in Topeka; here's a photo of the car on the hook:
So, the epic thrash ends in an epic fail LOL! Somehow, though, I just don't feel so bad about this one. I knew it was a gamble going in, especially the part about the internal water leak. In the end that's what got us; we successfully addressed all the other problems that came our way. I was glad to see all my Drag Week pals, and the car got a phenomenal reception at the event; everybody liked it. And now I have another whole year to improve this program, and bring it back with a vengeance at Drag Week 2012. I can accomplish a lot in a year...
Thanks to all the people who have kept up with this blog and offered support and encouragement; I really, really appreciate it. Thanks especially to the people who came out to the track to support Joel and I with the car; Jim, Wes, and several other guys come to mind. Next year is gonna be different, and better. I'll be starting up my "Road to Drag Week 2012" blog in the next several weeks.
