Finally! Summit Racing Bracket Series at Texas Motorplex on Saturday and Texas Muscle Car Club Challenge at North Star Dragway on Sunday.

Let's go racing!

 

Well there you go. 7.865 on a 93oct tune. E85 is worth at least 2 tenths in the eighth mile.

DA is 2863'.

Wouldn't have thought E85 was worth that much. My best is 7.5 but better DA. I'll need to check my spreadsheet tonight for that.

----------

Got a first round bye. Went 7.95 on a 7.85 dial. 1.95 60' , I need drag radials. These tires are about done.

Lost in the second round. Went 7.91 with another 1.90 60'. guy I raced was dialed .4 quicker and caught me at the 60 because he was that much quicker. Just paced me down the strip for the win.

 

Speaking of video quality. I was live streaming my video today on Facebook and noticed that my video was wavy again. Previously I thought it had something to do with my rendering software but I guess not.

So I Googled and low and behold, the iPhone 6+ camera is defective. And I'm SOL in getting it fixed for free.

I'll be looking for an updated video solution for your viewing pleasure.

 

Well after some thoughtful consideration, I'm going to back down my racing participation. I intended to compete the full season in these two series but all the early season rain outs have adjusted my plans. For instance, 3 of the rain outs are rescheduled for the weekends bracketing Drag Week which means I'll miss those.

My focus now is preparing for Drag Week. First thing is to finish burning off this tank of nasty gas and getting corn juice back in the car. Finish tweaking the tune with that.

And drag radials.

I'll say one lesson learned, if you're going to do the flex fuel conversion *and* any other intake/exhaust enhancements, you might as well do headers. Oh well, it'll need to wait until I do my heads/cam package.

----------

Reviewing my previous runs with E85 against the last session with pump gas, I can definitely see how knock retard starts affecting my runs as temp increases. Meaning E85 is more consistent. Despite the heat & elevated DA I was expecting better times. But with the increased power traction is becoming a problem.

----------

For the record...
Current mods: E85 & tune, Edgyvette ported intake & TB, Borla catless x-pipe, Halltech CAI (but did not contribute to the below times), MMS CC. Michelin PSS ZP tires.

Best times to date (1/8 mile & 1/4 mile were two different runs)...
Reaction: .002
60': 1.752
330': 4.927
1/8 ET: 7.525
1/8 MPH: 96.38
----------
1000': 9.791
1/4 ET: 11.653
1/4 MPH: 121.37

Both runs were ~900' DA, ~50% humidity, ~65*.

 

hope you will consider us for H/C and headers

halltech, headers and our updated tune will go 11.0 or better at 125mph

 

No doubt! You guys are at the top of my list when the time comes.


However for sentimental reasons, I'm going to reach out to Reher-Morrison and see what if anything they have going on for these engines.

 

Fixed my fueling problem. I was at half a tank so topped off with E85. Reading at 45% content. Man what a difference.

 

I'll just leave this here...
https://www.cidheads.com/collections...cylinder-heads

 

I went on a little road trip this morning to South Arlington. Went to look at a set of LT1 heads at Reher-Morrison Racing Engines. (see above) They now have my name on them.

Darin Morgan was gracious enough to show us (my brother and his son came along) around the shop.


I had *NO* idea! It's one thing to build a motor that makes 1,000+ hp NA. It's another thing to make a 1,800+ HP nitrous or blown engine live for as many as 100 passes.

Stuff that is normal for their builds is exotic for the world I live in.

Got a peek at a few skunk works.

Everything from Stock/Super Stock to Pro Mod to Pro Stock. I could hang out there all day and listened to his stories.

Climate controlled dyno room with big inch big block


Big inch, big power LS


Goofing around in front of the shop


Nephew standing in front of lots of trophies


RIP Buddy. You were truly one of the great ones

 

 

Update: This forum doesn't seem to be a good fit for what I want to post. So I've moved this over to a blog platform.
https://blackjackc7.wordpress.com/

 

The blog is neat idea.

 

Ok, I've got all my content transferred. I added a dedicated url too. https://blackjackc7.com/

 

Bummer on blowing out ankle. You will have to keep posting here so people know your blog is updated?

 

Yeah, I'll do that.

 

I'm coming up on 10k and plan on changing the oil/filter.

In a couple of months, I'll be heading out from Dallas to the midwest to spend a week racing at Drag Week and then driving back.

I was planning on having the trans & diff oil changed before heading out. Any thoughts on that?

 

I would change the diff oil the first time at 500 to 1500 miles and then every 30,000. However, if I road course the car I would change diff way more often and check what the manual says, I can't remember. For drag racing probably every 10k is good. This is just my opinion.

For the auto trans, I don't know. I guess it depends on how hot it gets.

 

Interesting outing on Saturday.

Obviously, my car has been sitting for the past 2 weeks due to my injury. I did start it up a week ago and let it warm up. I also put the car from P-R-N-D and back a few times.

Fast forward to last Saturday (7/1/2017). I wanted to get out and I knew I was getting low on fuel and needed to fill up. Took the car out and drove up and down the highway for about 15 minutes, in manual to keep the AFM from kicking in, so I could run the tank down as far as possible. I was running a mix of E85 & Premium that gave a reading of 45% ethanol.

I pull in to the Country Store (Valero) gas station to fuel up at the E85 pump. Top off with 16.5 gallons total. Noted that the pump had a sticker that read minimum 70% ethanol content. I'm guessing that it was at the minimum because that 16.5 gallons plus the 2 remaining gallons of E45 yielded a 65% ethanol content.

I'll try the nearby RaceTrac to see if it's any better; otherwise I guess I'll be going back to Kroger for my corn juice as they seem to consistently read about 80%.

On a side note, when I went to leave, my car triggered a CEL and it wouldn't move. Luckily, I had a reader because I was monitoring my ethanol % so I was able to read and reset the codes. One was a P0700 which would explain why the car wouldn't move. The other was a U0073 which I still haven't figured out. Once I reset the codes, I drove around for another 30 minutes without an issue. I'll just keep an eye on it for now.

Also, I was only able to reset because I was carrying my Lenova Yoga Android tablet with TorquePro on it. Reminder to install an iPhone app that works with my OBDLink MX Bluetooth OBDII reader just so I can read and reset codes. Well apparently that's not possible. Probably worthy of a separate post.

 

Bought an ethanol content tester and tested several pumps this morning. All the Valero & Racetrac pumps are 70%. The Kroger pump tested right at 85%. Lesson learned.

 

I finally pulled the trigger on a better camera setup, the .

Charged the battery, read the instructions, and got everything configured for a test drive. I drove to the Post Office and back. It’s about a 10 minute drive round trip. On the way to the PO, the first half of the video, I had it set to the wide angle view. In the PO parking lot I changed the view to what I call “normal” but Garmin labels as Zoom. I did not turn on the auto-stabilization. I need to do that for a test, but as you can see the video quality is much better than the iPhone 6+.


The file uploaded to youtube is 480p resolution; file size is 665MB. The 1080p resolution file was over 2GB.

With the remote it’s a much simpler setup to turn on/off. Now I need to find a data overlay that I like.