Tell us about the motor parts, too.
Well the motor that this is all on now is our "mule". It's a B block, counterweighted stock crank, warmed over stock rods, SBC pistons (4" bore), custom grind cam, cam supports, big valves, hogged out ports, external belt drive oil pump, an original cast iron Winfield head (complete with cracks and brazed repairs), billet 10,000RPM flywheel and clutch, aaaand I think that's about it. This same hardware has gotten us 140+ without a turbo and 155+ with a turbo and an almost immeasurable amount of boost.
This is just the first part in a very long saga. So first, the idea is to get this thing tuned on EFI and get everything dialed in. We have a "killer" motor in the works which includes a 5 main girdle, billet crank, billet rods, custom pistons, etc. The last thing we wanted to do was hurt the "killer" motor on the dyno while we were trying to dial in the EFI thus the reason for running the combo that we have now. We've blown up so many B's that destroying another one won't be such a big deal but killing your "killer" race motor with big bucks billet parts would be bad. The original plan was to tune the mule motor and then transfer everything over to the "killer", tune it with the turbo, and then put it in our new streamliner and go for 200.
Well we got the itch to run something again at Bonneville (I think it's been 5 years since we ran last) so we decided that if this motor doesn't self destruct on the dyno we'll take it to Speed Week and see how we do in V4F/GL. We hold the fuel record (ran on gas) at 140 which is already higher than the gas record soooo.... not saying it'll be easy but we're hoping to run as fast on EFI naturally aspirated as we did before with the turbo and an untuned mechanical injection system.
If the streamliner isn't done in time we'll just keep running the lakester. The reason we're tuning with the roadster is because the lakester is more or less direct drive (auto trans with manual valve body and no torque converter). We'll be tuning on a chassis dyno that requires being able to start from zero which the lakester can't do.
No shake downs planned for El Mirage. If it's going to blow it's going to do it on the salt. Actually our biggest concern is keeping the flywheel on the crank and not so much blowing it up. The achilles heel of the stock crank is the flange and we've cut a few motors in half after the flange breaks and the crank free revs to 7000 rpm or so and all the rods let go and take out the block. Yeah, we don't like it when that happens.
