It’s been a couple of weeks since the Racewars 2017 event in Albany & boy was it a great weekend.

Along with my dad & brother we had 3 cars entered, They were:

VE SS A6 with Cam’d & Magnacharge’d 2300 – My Dad’s
VE SS M6 – 402ci LS2/ETP Heads & Harrop 2300 – Brothers
VX Drag Car – 410ci Twin Turbo/TH400 – Mine

My Dad’s car performed flawlessly all weekend & became the stand in when my brothers car died, but there was still a decent photo taken of them together before it did, lol.

Now with my brothers car,  about the 4th or 5th run on the saturday the engine developed a severe miss and shake when running, after pulling the plugs out and finding 1 of them severely damaged (Cylinder 2) we put it on the trailer. 

We didn’t know how bad the damage was going to be until we got it back home and pulled the heads off anyway.

However during the weeks since racewars & between working on it, it was mentioned online that during cleanup the racewars crew had picked up the head of a valve albeit squashed and bent off the runway.

Considering the state of the plug, we were pretty certain it was “ours” & then as sure night comes after day, That’s exactly what we found when we pulled the head off the drivers side. Valve stems still in place by the new springs at least…

Wait a minute, something doesn’t look right….Along with the combustion chamber for that cylinder, the piston had taken a beating. Luckily the bore doesn’t looked to have sustained any major damage, but we haven’t gotten the block off for machining/honing for the new pistons yet so the verdict on the block is unknown.

The annoying thing about all this, is before the event I had just spent a bunch of money on the new valve springs/seats/retainers as the old springs had been on for nearly 8 years or so & since the motor is mine it had been used in 2 of my previous car’s so it was well over due for freshen up.

The pistons i don’t really care about as we had already planned on changing them out after racewars anyway.

So with saturday kinda starting out pretty shit with my brothers car & me originally only planning on doing limited runs in my drag car to save it for the 1000m stuff. I ended up using it a lot more with some passenger rides & testing for the 1000m.

With my brother in the car for a couple of 800m roll-on’s we hit a high 292 & 298 so i was pretty confident of going over 300kph on the sunday. My “idea/plan” leading up to racewars was to get my 300 or more and then put it straight on the trailer, that way i wouldn’t be getting “greedy” with it especially since i still needed the car to compete at another drag racing event on the 22nd of April (3 days away as i write this).

On the Sunday for the 1000m standing starts & with the passenger seat removed the car seemed worse for traction especially for the first 300 meters, I was having to get off or feather the throttle but the 1st run got another 298kph at-least.

Thankfully the 2nd run at 2:29pm got slightly quicker at 302.58kph & with that it went straight on to the trailer.

That is.. When i made it back to the pits… as my battery had gone flat on the return road with the fans on.  As it turns out my alternator even before the event had started to show signs of being on the way out.

1 run fueling would be leaner then what i was commanding in the tune, the next run it would be fine or richer. So i started logging the ecu battery voltage and sure enough the voltage wasn’t consistent.

So i have now put in a new alternator and ran a new sense wire all the way to the battery in the rear & I have 14.6 volts at the battery with the car running vs 12.3v previously which is no good for my fuel pumps & the tune!

Obviously it would worsen depending on how long the car was running for, which at the Motorplex isn’t really that long at each event, but the 8-10 minute drive back through the dirt at Albany was a bit too long to be driving all the electrics.

Anyway I hope you enjoyed reading & watching my sum-what summarized view of the weekend from a racer’s perspective. We’ll be back in Albany again next year with hopefully a couple more of our own 300+kph capable car’s…

Stay Tuned