Steve and I were up at 6:30 this morning, and after breakfast at the hotel we hit the road for the track. The track gates were supposed to open at 7:30, but we wanted to get there a little early so we were on the road by 7:00. We rolled up to the track at 7:20 and they had opened the gates early, and it looked like there were already 150 cars on the grounds. We quickly parked the truck and trailer, got the car unloaded and hooked up the Drag Week trailer, and then headed for the registration lines. By the time we got into line it was 8:00. Later, at 1:25, I finally reached the registration tent. Registration is SO slow at Drag week.
On the other hand, waiting in line gives you a chance to check out all the other cars and catch up with old friends. Pulling in right behind me was Bill Fowler in his 71 Mustang convertible with the 1000 HP 385 series engine. Pics of Bill's car and his engine are below:
Bill spent the summer trying to get his Fox body Mustang ready to transplant the big engine into, but he ran out of time so he was back again with the 71. He has the car plumbed for nitrous and is waffling between running BB/NA and BB/PA. While I was talking to Bill, Tom Posthuma showed up, so we talked for a while. Tom was looking around for Joel, aka Captain Stabbin, but he hadn't appeared yet. Finally I called Joel and he and Kevin (thatdarncat) were at a Lowes or a Home Depot or something, because Joel's horn wouldn't work and he needed a switch to use as a backup in case he couldn't get it fixed at the track. A horn is required to run in Drag Week.
A couple of minutes later I bumped into Curt Johnson. Curt is back with his Fox body Mustang with big block Chev power, and last year ran a bunch of 9.0s in BB/NA with that car. He is running the same class this year. (Bill, if you are reading this, maybe you should go BB/PA
The "prom queen's ride" has no shot in BB/NA unless Curt breaks.) Curt and I talked for a while and caught up, and I told him about my rod knock scare, which still had me shaking my head. One of Curt's friends is here and running in my class; his name is Brad and I remember him from DW'09, when he looked to have a pretty competitive car but broke part way through the event, if I recall correctly. I was sure that Brad would be fast. Shortly after that I ran into Dustin Hasse, who was one of the original gang at Drag Week 2005, and we started talking about maybe getting all the guys from 2005 together at some point during the week. There were a bunch of us there, and there has never been a better Drag Week than the first one in 2005, so it would be fun to get together and rehash old times over a couple of beers.
A couple of minutes later Joel and Kevin finally arrived; here's a picture of Joel's 67 Oldsmobile, and another shot of him working on the horn wiring under the hood:
The line was moving slowly, so I was able to leave the car for several minutes at a time and walk up and down the registration line talking to folks. I ran into a guy with a really nice Torino Cobra running in the event; here are some pics of the car:
There was also a 66 Galaxie painted up to look like an old NASCAR racer:
Tom Posthuma came by again and pointed out Alan Casida's Galaxie, which I had driven right by but missed. I went over to get a couple of shots; it is a really nice looking car:
A little later Alan came by and we had a nice chat. By this time I was hanging out pretty close to the car, because the registration line was moving more frequently. Here's a picture of the registration line at about 10:00 AM:
Lots of people were stopping by to look at the car, and finally a guy with a serious looking camera and tripod came up, said he was from Hot Rod, and wanted to get a video of me opening up the hood on my car. He had me do it twice, from a couple of different camera distances; it will be interesting to see if/when that shows up on the Hot Rod website.
A little while later Joel came by; he had managed to get his horn fixed and hung around for a while while the line moved. There were two lines at registration, one for Daily Driver and the Unlimited cars, and one for everybody else. The Daily Driver line moved much faster than the line I was in, and despite arriving quite a bit later than I did, Joel had made it through registration much faster. While hanging around by my car he decided to reprise his "Captain Stabbin" role, and try to get the locking spears through the holes on my Drag Week trailer in one push. I tried to get him to bet on it, but he hadn't done it in a while so he wisely declined; he ended up trying it five or six times without success. Here he is prior to the first try:
Finally we made it to the head of the line and got through the registration process. I said hello to Hot Rod editor David Freiburger and told him I was hoping to reverse three years of bad luck at Drag Week this year. He thanked me for coming and wished me luck. I drove out from the registration tent, picked up my Hot Rod "goodie bag" and Drag Week t-shirt, and then Steve and I headed for the concession stand. It was getting to be pretty hot at the track and the sun was really beating down, and we needed some refreshment.
The test and tune portion of the program had gotten going around 1:00, so after getting some drinks Steve and I headed up to the stands and watched the racing for a while. Finally we got going back to the car, to get it ready to make a pass or two at the track. There were a lot of changes to the car since the last time I had run it a few weeks ago, including new tires, a new converter, a new four link location, and new race fuel, VP Q-16. I'm always nervous driving for the first time at a new track, and with all these changes to the car I tried to be very deliberate getting it ready, and making sure everything was right before Steve and I got into the car and headed for the staging lanes. The lanes were also moving very slowly, and it took a half hour or so before I finally made it up to the line. This was the first burnout for the new tires, so I did a fairly long one, and then pulled to the line and launched the from a footbrake as usual. Right off the bat there was a problem; the car was missing badly in first gear. I hadn't ever had that happen before with this engine. The shift light flashed and I went to second, still missing, but then it cleaned up and ran out the end of the quarter sounding pretty good. Slowing down after the stripe, and approaching the return road, I was already thinking about what the problem could be.
Two possibilities immediately came to mind. First, when I changed plugs earlier this week, after street driving the car for a couple hundred miles, the plugs were very black, indicating that the EFI tune for street driving was really rich. I had changed the plugs, but then drove the car about 50 miles to the alignment shop and back, and I was wondering if the plugs had turned black already and were not working at high engine speeds. The other possibility I thought of was the new fuel. VP said that this fuel, which was oxygenated, needed to be run about 5% richer than standard race gasoline. So, when I filled up the tank I had richened the EFI fuel map by 5%. But it almost seemed like the car was running rich, and that maybe I shouldn't have done that despite the fuel. I idled down the return road and picked up my time slip, which was a miserable 10.38 at 130 MPH. My pit was right at the end of the track, so I pulled in there and shut the car off. Steve was going to wait in the stands until Joel ran and then come back, so I got out of the car and started pulling the plugs. I got #1 through #4 out and they looked pretty good; no serious carbon fouling or anything like that. It seemed like the plugs were not the problem.
About this time another guy I knew from some previous Drag Weeks came by and said hi. He asked what was wrong with the engine, and I told him about my suspicions. He said that I'd been trailing a lot of smoke starting at the halfway point of the track, which surprised the heck out of me; I'd had no idea. He said, "Look at the left front tire." There was a bunch of oil on the tire and the lower control arm. Uh-oh...
I thought maybe that the dry sump catch can had filled up during the pass and had been puking oil out of the breather, but the breather felt dry. Where was that oil coming from? I looked in the top of the dry sump can, and was surprised to see that it was nearly empty. What the hell? I crawled under the car and looked around for a valve cover leak or a dry sump line leak, but didn't see anything. Then I looked at the oil pan:
I'm sure you can just about imagine the shock I felt when I saw the hole in the oil pan. I was done; another Drag Week disaster. I kind of sat back in shock for a while, as Steve and Joel and Kevin came over. For the life of me I couldn't reconcile the reason for this problem, but now it seemed like the noise I'd heard on Thursday night may have been a rod knock after all. But I hadn't heard that noise all day today; it didn't make any sense.
After calming down a little I started thinking about the circumstances surrounding this failure. I have a low oil pressure warning light that points straight at me from the dash, with a bright red bulb in it. I never saw it lit up going down the track, coasting down from the pass, or on the return road. So I must have still had some oil pressure all the way up until I shut the car off. If I'd had a catastrophic engine failure like a broken connecting rod, for example, I'd have thought that one of the plugs would be destroyed, so I pulled the #5 through #8 plugs, but they all looked OK. #5 looked a little blacker than the rest, but that was the only difference. Curt Johnson showed up and suggested I crank the engine with the coil wires off to see if we could hear any knocking. The engine sounded perfectly normal during cranking. I had Kevin watch the chain through the plexiglas window while I was cranking the engine, and he said the chain looked fine. We began to think that maybe something had come loose in the engine, hit the reciprocating assembly, and got punched through the oil pan. The oil was completely gone from the dry sump system, but maybe there had still been some oil in the tank while the engine was running, and after I stopped the car it all drained out through the hole in the pan; I hadn't seen the hole until 15 minutes after I'd parked the car.
Kevin suggested that we pull a valve cover and see if we could see anything wrong in the top end; maybe a rocker adjuster broke, fed down through the timing cover to the pan, and got kicked out. But I was going back to the pass down the track; the "miss" may not have been a miss at all, it may have been a broken component that finally came loose halfway down the track and freed up the engine to rev normally. The whole thing was bad karma.
At Drag Week in 2007 I blew up a supercharger on the drive down to the event, and then after replacing that broke the transmission at the test and tune, and Joel and I stayed up all night pulling the transmission, having a local trans guy fix it, and re-installing it so we could race the next day. But at 56 years old, those days are behind me; I wasn't up for a massive thrash that may or may not fix the car. After all the work I'd put into this car over the last few months, I had already decided that if I developed a major problem at Drag Week I wasn't going to bust my hump to get it fixed. And this was obviously a major problem.
So, Steve and Kevin and I packed up the truck, and with the help of a bunch of other guys rolled the car onto the trailer and tied it down. On the way out of the track a bunch of the guys waved at me, but I just didn't feel like talking to them. We should really go to the track tomorrow for the first day of the race, but I just have no desire to explain to an endless group of people why I'm out of the race already. Steve and I will hit the road for home tomorrow morning.
Since I have the week off I'm going to spend a couple days cleaning up the shop, because it is just a disaster after the Drag Week thrash. Then, I'm going to take the engine apart and figure out what went wrong. With luck the reciprocating assembly will be intact, but I'm not holding my breath. One positive is that the water jacket is intact, so whatever happened didn't compromise the water jacket of the engine. I will try to put a post up here next weekend with what I've found.
Now that there's no point in keeping secrets anymore, this engine made 970 HP at 7200 RPM on the dyno. It hit 950 at 6500, and was still making around 955 at 7500, which was as far as I ran it on the dyno. It was a little lower than I was hoping for, but the intake manifold and headers were definitely not optimized for the engine's RPM band, so I was reasonably happy with the result; I have never had a naturally aspirated engine that made more power. At the track a couple of weeks ago the best pass was 9.32 at 147.5, and the converter was stalling around 6000 RPM, which was about 500 RPM too low for this engine. The 60 foot time was only 1.46 for that pass, which is way, way low; should have been a good two tenths faster, and probably 3 tenths faster for the ET, if I'd had the suspension tuned properly, and a decent set of tires plus some track prep. The car should have run 9.0 at Drag Week, and my goal was to get into the eights sometime this week.
Once again, thanks to all you guys for the encouragement and support on this project. I'll get the car fixed and get it back on the track next year, and we'll see what it will really do...
