Driver's Seat

Up to now...

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This is the first in a series of posts to help keep you up to date as to what we have been doing and where we are headed. So, to bring you up to speed let's start at the beginning...

Mid last year, Howard Martin approached me with an idea. He had a 1970 Plymouth Satellite sitting out in front of his shop rotting away. Since I have been itching to get back behind the wheel, he proposed that we build the car together and that I can race it. Since he had most of the parts laying around from other Mopar builds, this was going to be a lot cheaper than if I did it on my own. So we started in June of 2015 by tearing it down and fixing all of the rust. Well, that took about 5 months of grinding, welding, sanding, welding, fabricating, grinding, sanding, welding... well, you get the idea.

After months of hours after work and on weekends, we finally got the car together and running. Now to put in some finishing touches so we can race it. We got some Weld wheels for the front and cleaned up the set for the back and got some new rubber on them. When I ordered the rear slicks I goofed up and ordered some 30" tall tires instead of some 29" tall tires, but hey they fit and look great... more on this later.

Fast forward to February. Since there was no test-n-tune in January, we went directly into that day's test-n-tune, qualifying, and then competition. After a few hiccups with a thrown belt and the driver missing shifts, we got the car settled down, but could only pull off a 12:30 pass. The car was a pooch off the line and didn't come alive until about 1/2 track. But hey, we were going A to B! Once it came to first round of eliminations I was stoked. I got to chase down the other guy and boy did I. I blew by him at about 3/4 the way down the track and thought I was going to break out so I lifted a little. Well I guess I lifted too much as he beat me to the line by .002 seconds. But hey, the car is in one piece and it is going down the track.

So in getting ready for the next month, we swapped out the rear gears in hopes that that will help our 60 foot and overall ET. It did help, but only by a little less than 3/10s of a second. We are inching up on the elusive 11 second pass, but just not quite there yet.

Getting ready for the April races, we decided that we can't afford to miss shifts any more and that we need to get our launch RPM up a little higher so installed a B&M floor shifter and a higher stall torque converter. Let's see how this works out, hopefully we can find that 11 second pass in the car. I am however having fun running in the Sportsman class (12.00 seconds & slower) so I am not sure if I am going to push the car too hard to run in the Pro-Sportsman (10.00 - 12.00 second) class. 

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