Back from the drags and the winner is...........well there is sort of 2 winners! No slow 63, and me!
Friday was test and tune day, we got down there at around 12.30 after leaving Bruce's place in Canberra at 4am, (long drive!). Unpacked the car and did a few minor adjustments and it was ready to run.
Bruce drove the first one, after a bad bog on the line and a mid track back off because of a bad vibration it went through the lights at 78 mph and no time.
Back at the pits and a check of tyre pressures, one slick was under 10 psi and the other was 15, (they had gone down overnight) we pumped them up to 22 psi because the track was very grippy and went out again.
I drove this time, bit of a burnout in the water, lined up, fairly easy start, heaps of tyre spin and it heads for the wall, 2 gear off for the wall again, 3rd more wheel spin and what a hand full, something is wrong! 4th, more wheel spin and it keeps turning right, back to the pits and a quick check reveals a broken axel, this box was ment to be unbrakeable! Porsche cvs and drive flanges and 2 ltr Kombi axels.
We decided to pull it apart to see if we could do anything to fix it, out came the diff, it was a welded locker and the RH axel had snapped off, after a lot of looking and thought we decided to do a bodgey repair and see if we could run it on Saturday. We borrowed an angle grinder and ground the side of the diff housing away down to the axel, ground a big vee into the axel and welded it all together, Here is a pic of what we did. bodgey!!
After puting it all back in, Bruce went out and tried again, this time no burn out and a very easy start 1st gear, short shift to 2nd and into 3rd at 6000 rpm, and into 4th at 7000, it looked good, and beat the V8 powered Torana he was running, the time came up, 12.87
@97mph.
Bruce said it pulled very hard in 3rd and 4th gear and caught the other car he was running (which was on street tyres) thats how slow the take off was!
Bruce had the next run and broke the axel again, so we put it on the trailer and went home.
We left before Rod Penrose and Mike Kristen had finished, Rod had run 9.4 @ 152mph, Mike ran 10.5 @ 135mph that was his best, not bad for a 1776! and Dave Stoaker with Mike Waldren driving did a personal best of 10.4 @ 130ish mph and put a hole in a piston and came home early with us.
Its a great track and the event was run very well with as many runs as you want, We'll be back with a stronger gearbox. I think it should do 11's
