One week to go…

There are many things that you probably shouldn’t be doing the week before you leave for a National event. Let’s run through a few of them:

Dyno testing the car, welding on the car, making changes to the setup… Well I guess we broke 2 of those this last weekend, though we decided not to tweak the setup at all!

This is the offending distributor that gave us so much trouble a few weeks ago. It’ll go back to MSD for a rebuild, but for the meantime a backup distributor is in place and working great. That wasn’t the only fun from this past weekend, click through for more!

At 7:45AM in the morning, we show up at Power Curve Dyno in Austin, TX. A good friend of ours, Steve Hudson, owns the dyno and keeps it at this shop. Not satisfied with the carb tuning we did at the practice event last weekend we wanted to be able to simulate low-RPM pulls to see if we could tune out the stumble on throttle tip-in.

About an hour later we’re tied down and ready to roll – and the car runs out of gas! We’d run it a lot lower than we thought during the practice and came up short. A big thanks to Steve and Rick Martinez to jumping to the rescue and providing us with some much needed fuel!

This is the box of goodies that we had to use to play with…

This is the first pull. When Todd lays into it the bucking and long hesitation is what we were trying to tune out. We never actually did get a full power pull because the pickup kept cutting out up in the powerband, losing RPM signal. Since we weren’t there to tune peak power (the AFR was steady at 12.8 to 13:1 the whole way through), we focused on short pulls and playing with the accelerator pump and jets.

These little buggers were the focus of the day. Holley has a number of different accelerator pump cams that let you tune how quickly the pumps squirt and then you can tweak the nozzles themselves too. This page over at the was extremely helpful.

The tires were scalding hot on the dyno. You don’t want to do this with your brand-new race rubber! We were able to get the majority of the hesitation out. It might be time for a new carburetor. That done, we loaded up and parted ways, only to plan on meeting up again on Sunday for more punch list items.

First on the punch list was sealing up some holes from over-eager torch work during the front suspension redo. The spring buckets on a 2nd Gen subframe have to be cutout to enable installation of coil-overs. The control arms never had enough bump travel to touch the plates coming down the side, so fingers crossed they don’t touch now with a tiny bit less clearance! Not exactly pretty, but at this point we need functional over pretty.