1320 News

st a quick update on our 2011 progress..

As I mentioned in the last email we were having some traction problems, it appears the majority of that problem was the 28″ tire we were running had a 1″ smaller tread patch than the 26″ tire we ran last year.  We switched back to that 26″ tire for the NSCRA race on May 22nd at Palm Beach Raceway.

Fixed all the ignition issues with a set of Super Spark coil packs and rewired all of the coil wiring on the engine harness.  Unfortunately we had a lot of rain here and did not have a clear day to test the car before we headed to Florida for the race.  We headed down to Florida on Friday, the evening of the 20th, arrived at Palm Beach Raceway around 8:30pm on Saturday the 21st to make a few test passes and see how the 26″ tires were behaving.  Only had time to make 2 runs, and only captured 1 useful data log from the 2 runs.

The first run was just a quick test to feel out the track on low boost.  The second run left soft out of the hole and feathered the throttle a bit due to track conditions, put down a 9.4@151 with only a 1.6 60ft and boost still not turned up all the way (had to adjust the controller for the weather differences).  The datalog from the second run revealed that the car had shifted into overdrive right at the end of the pass.

Sunday morning we were the first ones in the gate, began unloading the car around 7:30am.  When backing the car off the trailer we noticed the reverse gear was almost completely gone, this gear uses the over drive clutch in the transmission.  Quickly identified the problem as a burnt overdrive clutch from the test pass the night before.  Overdrive is the smallest clutch in the transmission and this is exactly why it should not be used on a high HP, wide open throttle 1/4 mile pass.

Attempted a quick fix by flushing a few fresh quarts of fluid through the transmission and planned to baby the car until the finals.  Unfortunately on the first pass Sunday, 1st gear let go right around the 60ft mark, backed off the throttle to make the car drop into 2nd, and ran a 12.8@149mph.   The 1/8th mile on this pass was a 9.3@96mph, thats picking up an astounding 53mph in the 2nd half of the 1/4.  While this number must be skewed, it still shows the car is pulling stronger than ever.

We made the best out of our time in Florida, stopped and talked with every sponsor in Florida, and at Goodridge on the way back up to NC.  We met all of the Florida media groups and have them paying close attention to the car now.  We also met with the guys who run NSCRA for an entire day, they took photos of the car and will be publishing an article on the NSCRA website about it (this site gets over 100,000 indivual views a month).

The problems in the ECU with regards to shift points have been resolved, the car will not shift to overdrive again.  A new transmission -and- a spare are on the way.  And we are aiming to have the car ready within the next few weeks.

The next race on the Schedule is NSCRA Round 3 back at PBIR on July 16th, however there is another race before that, June 25th at Englishtown Raceway, Sport Compact Summer Slam that we will be aiming for.