True I've never run that on the salt...I've never been on the salt...period. But I've been close to those speeds. I've been 190+ in the 1/4 in a dragster, been close to 185 for multiple miles in Montana, and probably 500 passes on the strip at 165ish in my regular drag car. I'm 36 now and have been racing on four wheels for 20+ years of that and on 2 or 3(BMX/ATV/MX) for another 10. So I'm not new to the cost both physically and financially that racing and building race vehicles can put on you.
I chose Methanol, as the high boost I need is EASILY acheivable and liveable on alcohol(think indy 500 1000+hp for 500miles on boost in excess of 50+psi on 1.0L motors) run my drag car on it @ nearly 1000HP on a motor I built myself which has lasted seasons without a mechanical failure. I can mig/tig/plasma/bend as I have done most of my own chassis work on my drag cars which passed NHRA tech/sonic check etc and SFI spec'd to their rules, so I'm pretty familiar with that type of process.
I know quite abit about suspension design/tuning and hooking up that kind of power,(albeit on sticky pavement) and how aerodynamic lift, drag, and corner weighting your vehicle can affect its handling. A few years ago I spent quite some time talking to Al Teague who helped me out quite abit with parts selection etc when I was buying a lot of parts from Speedomotive building some drag motors I was unfamiliar with, and hope that if I burn up the phone lines and/or email I MIGHT be able to pick his brain a little bit.
Some sponsors have already shown interest so I may not have to foot the bill for the $50K+ I expect this to cost. I'm thinking of talking a shot at El Mirage first bofore tackling Bonneville, and the car should be fully shook down prior to that as the drag record needs to happen first, and then appropriate gearing/aero/weighting issues dealt with prior to El Mirage.
I know I'll probably regret posting this, but here goes. No one myself included are trying to put you down or start a pi**ing contest. I'll offer some observations/comments that are free and you can take them for what they are worth (remember they were free) or simply ignore them.
I have no doubt you have gone fast, but that won't make your car fast.
Your build skills will help you and so will being familiar with working on motors, but not much else above will apply to b'ville.
Your mention of 1000+ hp indy motors just won't get it on the salt where you don't have the traction of asphalt and mile wide tires. You will be running on tires that are about 5 inches wide and will have 70-90 lbs. of air in them and the salt on a good day has the coefficient of traction of about .4 that of asphalt. Ask Johnr about running a high hp full power/no power small motor. He has done it successfully, but to get one of these to hook is a chore. Forget HP at b'ville. One of the better things I ever heard came from Jack Costella during an interview. He said "you need a truck motor, something that can pull a long hill as running on the salt is a long hill to climb" or something to that effect. You need a torque motor. You are in the gears for so long there. Plot your speeds with a rear gear that you will need to go 260 and see how long you are pulling the high gears.
The chart you posted on the other post is a guide not something written in stone. How do you know the exact Cd and area of your car after you have made the purposed changes? Is that HP at the crank, rear wheel?? Is the HP at the exact RPM you need it to be there. An example we have the dyno numbers on our car and this year ran an exit speed of 241 at 7070 rpm and the rpm was about flat there and we only picked up about 3 mph in the whole last mile, so we are at the limit of this configuration. But the Dyno says we should be making max HP at 7400 rpm, so why can't we pull that? The reason is that the difference in HP between 7000 rpm and 7400 is only 10-20 hp and the HP needed to run 253 (7400 rpm) is 100 HP more than that needed to run the 241 that we ran. So even though the motor makes more HP at 7400 it isn't enough to run the 253. See how critical the gearing can be. Gearing (all gears) is just as important, in my mind, as HP and aero to get the job done if you are going for the last mph for your combination. We are now looking for a 5 speed where we can change evey gear in it (except the 1 to 1 5th) to maximise our effort. We need to as we are not running a good body for our class.
You need to put a combination together the best you can with the data you have, but until you run it you won't know which way you need to go and you might just find out you can't get there with what you have.
You are talking about the HP to go certain speeds. Have you figured the weight needed in the car and where you will put it to get the traction needed to get that HP to the ground to reach the speed? At about 230 we were out of traction with our 3000 lb. car. We had to add over 800 lbs. to go faster than that and run the 241. But now that has hurt the acceleration of the car so we need more HP to accelerate faster and more HP to go faster and we will probably have to add more weight to run over 250. There is a lot going on that is very hard to just figure on paper. If you try and add traction with a spoiler now you have hurt the aero of the car and will need more HP to fix that. Also you can't just dump the weight over the rear as then the car won't go down the course without spinning. You probably have read about "center of pressure" and "center of gravity" and how they can work to make the car go straight.
Like littleliner said if you want to make your car the fastest Subaru then do everything you can and don't worry about a class. If you want to race for a record chances are you need to pick a body and motor (most likely not from the same manufacture) and go for it because the guy who has the present record probably did that.
I could go on and on, but by now you are probably tired of it, so I'll just say stick around, learn from some of the guys on here who have set records and good luck,
Sum
