Woeful Night at the Drags

[Karl Bebout]

My day at the races sucked! Didn’t break anything or wreck, and got in for cheap so its wasn’t all bad, but I couldn’t get the car to go fast. First four runs, on gasoline only were 11.90s-12.0s and only about 108 MPH. Couldn’t figure out what was going on. The car would launch hard and carried the front wheels almost out to the tree, but it wasn’t making any top end power. The fifth run I finally gave it a spray of nitrous for 100HP and went an 11.43 at 115MPH. Still ‘way off the mark that I’d done the last time I had the car to the strip. The only change was that I’d replaced the 800 CFM Edelbrock with an 850 Holley. I thought it should go much faster than it did. Did lots of tinkering with the timing and couldn’t make power. Pretty frustrating since I’d really been looking forward to running the car. Had been hoping I could get it into the 10’s on gasoline alone since I’d run an 11.44 before but it wasn’t to be.

Great relief yesterday. I pulled the plugs and they all looked fine and then I noticed that the throttle linkage bracket was a little cockeyed. Had my wife press the accelerator to the floor and found that the throttle plates were not opening al the way. The primaries were maybe 2/3-3/4 and the secondaries were maybe 1/3 open, at the most. I’m thinking that could make a bit of a difference. Ha. Now I’m all hot to get out and try it again. Probably won’t now until fall. The temperature Saturday night was only about 80° but its warming up quickly. Its also hard to find a day that the track is not having some sort of special thing going on and I’d much rather go when its not busy. Lot less time waiting in the staging lanes. Oh well.