Our first five.......................

We had a great day at Texas Motorplex! They postponed the race until Sunday due to Saturday's forecast and Sunday was sunny with a bit of wind. We warmed the car up and took her out for an eighth mile check out pass. Everything went well and David shut it off shortly after the eighth mile marker and we brought it back and checked everything over real close. All looked well so we headed to the line for a full,hard pass. The car launched hard and was on a good run. When David pulled the chutes the scoreboard flashed 5.99 seconds at 232 mph!!! Let me tell you the feeling was incredible. This a huge milestone for my team and we did it with a soft tune up and no damaged engine parts.
Thanks to my wonderful wife,my whole crew, and DRE Racing for all their help and support!
I'll post more pictures as they come.
Brad

First fire up of 2009

Saturday we fired the car up after having everything apart all winter long. It was a tense situation for me. Even though I carefully assembled everything and double checked - triple checked every step - until it was running with good oil pressure and no leaks there was a weight of worry on my shoulders. That's all behind me now. She fired right up and sounded good. Tears running down my cheeks from the fumes and feeling the noise rumble in my guts again was great!
I've got a few days worth of work between now and April 18th to get the trailer and all our support supplies ready. Please come to Texas Motorplex at Ennis Texas on the 18th. We'll be there along with several other front engine dragsters and a funny car doing spring testing. Gates open at 8am Hope you can make it!

Brad

Consumption - feeding the beast

First off I want to apologize for taking so long since my last blog update. My new job has been keeping me really busy but that's a good thing.

I wanted to talk a little about the amount of fuel and oil that the car consumes at a race. Above is a picture of the empty fuel and oil containers after unloading them from the trailer from the last race. As you can see we have to carry a lot of fuel and oil. We made 4 full runs with the car and did four warm ups in the pits. We used 35 gallons of nitromethane, 8 gallons of methanol and about 24 gallons of 70 weight oil. Keep in mind that we often warm the car up on methanol to cut down on our use of nitromethane which is much more expensive. We put 2.5 gallons of oil in the engine for a warm up and then drain it and put 3.5 gallons of fresh oil in for the run. Nitromethane dilutes oil in an engine very rapidly and turns 70 wt oil into yellow soup in a matter of seconds. That is why we have to change the oil so often.
For your consideration, the air to fuel ratio of a gasoline racing engine is about 12:1 meaning 12 parts air to 1 part gasoline. In a methanol/alcohol burning engine the ratio is about 6:1 so there is twice as much alcohol per part air as in a gasoline engine. Nitromethane is an oxygen carrying fuel so much less air is needed per part fuel. The ratio for nitromethane is around 3:1 - twice as much fuel per part air as an alcohol engine and 4 times as much as a gasoline engine. That gives you an explanation as to why the car needs so much fuel.

Another very quick fact for you gearheads is that the pistons in our engine at 9000 rpm go from 0 (TDC/BDC) to a top speed 307 mph (mid stroke) and back down to 0 again (TDC/BDC) twice per crankshaft revolution. Cool huh!

The other two pictures are of the car in its current state and loading it in the trailer to take it to get the chassis inspected and tagged for 2009. This is a safety precaution and is required to be done every year. As you can see in the pictures the short block is in the car. I should be receiving the heads in a couple of weeks. It will take me about 3 days to get the heads clearanced (valve guides and spring installed heights)and finish assembling the engine and clutch. I hope to be able to fire the engine a couple of weeks before our April 18th test session. Since we have changed some things and had everything completely apart over the winter it is a good idea to start the engine and check for leaks or any problems so they can be remedied before we load the car and head to the track.

As always thanks for viewing my blog!

Brad

Spring fling...........

Well it's not quite spring yet but it's getting close! I have had a lot of parts coming in and the block is at the machine shop getting the sleeves honed. Hopefully in a couple of weeks I'll be able to start putting the engine back together and put it in the car.
We have a test date lined up with the folks of the Dallas Mopar club and the Cowtown Performance Mopars Team. It will be April 18th at the Texas Motorplex. We would like to thank them for their help and especially Marty Robertson of MAALT Transportation for his willingness to help with our travel expenses. We have rounded up a good mix of dragsters and a funny car for this test session so if you can try to come for the "MOPARS at the Motorplex" event on April 18th at Ennis, TX.
So far the rest of our schedule is pretty light for 2009:
Goodguys 21st annual Hot rod Nationals at Indianapolis, IN June 12-14
Match race at Northstar Dragway Denton, TX Sept 26th

Hopefully I can squeeze another match race or two in my work schedule and add to our racing in 2009.

Crew Chief John Dearmore is recovering well from his knee replacement surgery. Let's keep him in our thoughts and prayers as he goes through the painful therapy.

That's all for now. Thanks for looking!

Brad

Looking ahead..........

2009 is rolling and I wanted to give everyone a few updates.
I have started my new job at the Flint Creek power plant and I am really enjoying the work, the people, and learning all about boilers and the systems used to produce electricity from coal. I feel like I am working and going to school at the same time. I like learning new things and the challenges associated with it. We have 2 planned outages of the plant this year for maintenance. When the plant is shut down no employees are allowed to take time off so that is definitely going to affect our racing this year.
I do have a couple of dates to mention though. We plan to test the car April 18th at Texas Motorplex near Ennis, TX and we have a match race scheduled at Northstar Dragway for Sept 26th. I am still working on finalizing who will be the other car we will run against at Denton.
We still plan on racing at the Goodguys race in Indiannapolis, IN on June 12 - 14 but that will most likely be the only open race we run this season because of my work schedule. Hopefully we can make up for that with some more match racing and I'll keep you posted on any more developments in that area.

Thanks for reading my blog!

Brad