Bonneville 2013; Nothing to it!
For everyone who makes it to Bonneville for Speedweek, my hats off to you. Just the trek to the promised land of speed is a huge undertaking. If you put a tire to salt in anger you understand the tremendous amount of work it takes to field a race vehicle; be it car or bike.
The event itself that's put on by the SCTA/BNI is almost as hard to imagine being put on by a small but dedicated group of volunteers, simply amazing. Thanks to every one of you.
Our visit to the "Great White Dyno" was less then stellar. No mater how well you have or haven't done in the past at Bonneville it needs to take its pound of flesh from time to time. This year the good was minimal waiting when you arrived to the starting line. The bad was the record number of spins & several crashes with drivers/riders getting trips to Salt Lake City. Thankfully, everyone seems to be mending well.
So now for our little adventure: We made a checkout pass to the 3 Sat afternoon to make sure the new turbo system didn't melt anything or worse! The pass netted us a 217 mph 1/4 and a 219 mile. Not bad but something didn't seem right on the data log as the engine was on the rev limiter with no boost the last 10 seconds of the run. Further checking led us to a clutch that would not disengage. After checking around we were able to borrow a 3 disk clutch from Wayne Jesel to replace out 2 disk unit. We also borrowed a really nice engine “A” frame puller from the Mariani Team. I want to stop here and say “Thank you” to both Wayne Jesel & Dennis Mariani. This is what Bonneville is about.
After pulling the engine (just a side note here, I had always said I’d never pull an engine on the salt. All the tools I’d need would be at home, especially with a turbo motor.) We changed the clutch and had it all back together and running in about a day and a half. So now its Wednesday 5:45 pm and we get to continue our little misadventure. The courses were staying open until 7:00 pm. But the fuel truck closes at 6:00. So too the ice truck (we need ice for the intercooler) so I have Kenard Deeds run into town for ice after scouting which course had the shortest line while racing to the fuel truck to top off with gas. After getting to the line, adding ice to the intercooler, getting the driver belted in, it was 6:50. Start the engine and I realized I had left the intercooler pump running for the last 15 minutes or so. Well this is not part of my tune up; so the engine was hard to keep running and as Kevin drove off I could see black smoke from the exhaust. Shortly after it backfired pretty hard and Kevin shut it off not sure why it was doing weird things.
So Thursday morning we go through our standard check out and warm the oil to start the car. Well now it won’t start. Traced it to the ignition system but with all the issues on the courses traction wise and our lack of time doing the check outs we wanted to do it was time to call it a meet.
We see lots of promise in our turbo package and feel lucky to have made it to race. It’s not as easy as many people think to run on the salt. Many of my neighbors did not fair as well as us. The team next door dropped a valve on Sat after setting 2 records at El Mirage earlier this year. Another team a few pits over sent the rods out of the block, and yet another over heated and grabbed a piston. So our car came home got cleaned up and I’ll fix the little issues we have and carry on. We might just run El Mirage and see how that goes.
I need to thank several other companies and people.
Edelbrock Data & ECU, Lucas Oil, Jesel Valve Train, Burns Stainless, Arias Pistons, Centerline Welding, Performance Solutions, D & A Engineering, BPE Heads, Isky Cams, Kirk Harkins, Jamie Wagner, Bob Dalton, Dave Isley, my sons Ryan & Kevin, and the one who tolerates all this madness, my wife Judy.
I’m sorry if I left anyone out, there were so many people who helped in so many ways.
“I Thank You All”
