Alright Already

 For those of you that have been religiously checking back to see if there was a fresh blog post since last Fall, I commend you on your diligence and patience. I'm terrible at keeping secrets at the best of times so this one was a killer. After the demise of our faithful old "Blue Bullet" race motor at last years season closer, Chris and I made a hard decision to bite the bullet and get our pal Dan Dvorak to build us something special. Dan is a legendary stock racer and engine builder who has been slinging his trade since our car was new. He resides in Waldo Florida so having a 700# crate shipped coast to coast seemed unreasonable to us...therefor we decided it was a good idea. As we began scheming with Dan about our hopes and expectations from this new mill it was clear that this project was going to quickly spiral out of control. Better the project than the car though. I made haste in acquiring a retired 413 block and heavily massaged heads from our pal and racing mentor Chris Barnes. Now that we had a starting point we needed to make some big decisions about induction, oiling, compression and the like. It was important to us to keep as much of a visually appearing 1964 race motor as possible. If our car was built in 1965, which is the era of our "Funny Wagon", it would most likely have a fuel injected Hemi for power. A private race team would probably be able to procure a cross-ram Max Wedge from the previous season for half of what it would cost to get into a Hemi. We went this route. Though our iron heads are not the original "hens teeth" Max Wedge" units, they are ported beyond belief and will (according to Dan) out flow the original MW heads. The Cross-ram that we decided to use is a beautiful reproduction built by A&A Transmissions and it has also been ported to match our tricked out iron heads. Since we're not running in a stock class we decided that it was o.k. to completely rollerise the motor and add every "go-fast" trick that those poor stocker's aren't allowed. It seemed like a good idea in the scheme of things. Dan took two brand new 750 cfm Edlebrocks and completely re-worked them for our application. There is way too much going on to list here but when the dust settled and Dan broke the motor in on his stand, running 15-20 gallons of fuel through the big lung to make sure that everything was well sealed and ran like a champ. It did. Dan was beside himself with the results. This from a guy who has been building race motors his entire life. He ran it for me on the phone and the sound was unbelievable. "It sounds like a funny car" Dan says. He of course is referring to a more modern top fuel type of car. The irony is that our machine is the original "funny car". Tonight we will install the motor and hopefully fire it up.

 Let the wild rumpus begin!!!

 

Out With a Bang

Chris and I got up at an ungodly hour on Oct.7th in order to venture out to the final race of the season in Osoyoos. The weather was perfect and crisp and the turn-out was huge for this little airport/drag strip. As usual our beloved nostalgia slicks were giving us no love. We tried various pressures and volcanic burnouts carrying them right up to the lights but to no avail. Next season we will be addressing this problem but on this particular Sunday we were content to live with it. As usual we got plenty of qualifying passes but by the end of our fifth run, old Chupacabra shut down and refused to start. A quick glance at the oil guage showed no pressure. I coasted off the return road and glided to to a halt in the dust.

 End scene.

 A spun bearing is the obvious culprit but we won't know for sure until we tear it down. The ironic thing is that this was the last race for the old "Blue Bullet". This 440 has been with us since the beginning and has been a tried and true power house over the last decade. Wait a minute Pat. Why is this the last race for that mill? Well race fans, I guess you will just have to stay tuned since we have a super exciting transplant in the works that will be an all out game changer for this car and team alike. Sorry for the spoiler but I'll hold out the details until install time. Until then it's off season time for El Chupacabra where we will be doing some steering geometry refinements, fuel system upgrade and a few smaller tasks to prepare for the 2013 race season. Stay tuned

...And We're Back

We survived yet another successful mission to Mission for their old time drags. Weather was perfect and the car was performing like a champ. It's been a couple of years since we last ventured down for this race so my memory failed me (yet again) when it came time for the molasses in January pace of the program. We waited no less than four hours between our 1st and 2nd passes on Saturday. That is an eternity to sit in the sun without beer. The endless line of beautiful race cars, low riders, hot rods, customs, boogy vans and choppers was like letting your favorite car show come to you.

We were saddened to see our pal Steve Chase explode a u-joint then probably not coincidentally drop a valve in his small block powered '64 Merc pick-up. He's worked so hard to make it perform but fortunately has a really positive attitude towards rebuilding. Our entourage in the pits consisted of no less than 15 friends and family cheering us on in the newly created "straight axle" class.

When eliminations finally rolled around on Sunday afternoon we had our game face on big time. I rolled through my burn out and waited while the crew cleared debris from the track. I was on the verge of backing up to re-heat the tires when we were urged forward. I cut an .052 light which got us the trophy for best light in our class (sadly enough) but spun the tires out of the hole putting us on the trailer. Note to self, heat tires to laser temps before trying to launch. Great weekend over-all and we look forward to hitting that race next year.

Mission Bound

There hasn't been anything noteworthy to write about lately unless you really need to know that we repaired our transmission so that we can now use reverse. Or perhaps the 4* shims that we added to our front leaf springs to give us more caster and stray away from the "shopping cart effect". Is it also possible that if I didn't bring to your attention the fact that a new volt guage and reverse button lock-out have been installed you may just have to end it all!!! Alright, enough silliness. Tomorrow morning before the birds have risen, we will be venturing down to Mission for the Langley Loafers old time drags. It is the one event that we really try hard not to miss. Nothing short of a chockablock weekend full of good times, sick cars and great people. We got El Chupacabra all shined up and loaded this afternoon and won't know what we've forgotten until it's already too late. There's going to be a lot of this.

Dial-A-Winner

We had a blast in Ashcroft this last weekend at the Langley Loafers "old time drags"  and actually managed to dial in the car a tad without too much hectic thrashing to distract us. We had a test & tune afternoon on Friday which was good to try a few new tweaking tricks before race day. The track prep was nothing short of outstanding with six second cars in the line-up to motivate the vht slingers. This translated into great traction for the first time ever with our Hurst pie crust slicks and a steady line-up of weekend warriors exploding their 12 bolt chevy rear-ends. At one point there was a line up of cars getting pushed off of the starting line. Weather was descent for the most part but insanely windy from every direction which reaked havok on everybody's dial-in.

 Two seats in a race car just makes sense. Welcome to the office.

 We ever so slowly ground through the weekend into eliminations on Sunday, where a class created for us (I'd like to think) was created, known as "straight axle". The class was small but we still managed to muscle our "Chubby Cobra" through the ranks. The finals found us paired off with an early '60s ghost ship Chevy van that just seemed to appear out of nowhere Sunday afternoon. an .086 light and half fender lead put us in the victory circle, taking our first win in the new car. Yeah us!! I suck at posting video but you can watch the victory run here.

J-Hook

Guess which straps are ours.

Weather looks like crap this weekend in Ashcroft but since we're kinda stupid and eager to race we'll drive over eight hours to find out for ourselves instead of listening to trained meteorologists. Buncha krak heads if you ask me...them not us.

Successful Thrash

 We had another great session racing at the dessert drag strip in Osoyoos last weekend. We conquered a few of our defects and made the car go it's fastest to date. As mentioned earlier, we were very traction limited with our 10" pie crust slicks so we decided to give them one more try with appropriate air pressure and nothing less than John Force style burnouts. Alas, we still managed to spin like crazy at the line. We brought our old M/T wrinkle wall slicks in case this was still a problem and we mounted them up for some test passes. The difference was staggering with a 3/10 increase in our 60' times and almost a half second faster in the 1/8th. Technology is stupid!!

 We managed to pull off a best 60' of 1.66 and a best e.t. of 7.43 @ 92 mph. We ended up putting down around 16 passes over the weekend, taking advantage of time only passes whenever possible. Our charging system seems to be back on line thanks to our new 105 amp alternator and super skookum 3 1/2 horse gas powered charging station that Chris cobbled together. We're still battling high temperatures and a shortage of reverse but the car is really coming into it's own. The driver is also getting a lot more comfortable behind the wheel cutting several back to back good lights. Don't get me wrong, it's still a scary beast that owns us every time we breath her back to life. The fact that we named this car after a mythical wild creature that drains the life force from it's prey becomes more prevalent every time I get behind the wheel.

The next race is June 8-10 in Ashcroft for the Langley Loafers old time drags including the straight axle shootout. I guarantee it'll be a ridiculous time for one and all.