So it turns out that you can’t always trust your tach. After changing the clutch and ruining the throwout bearing, I went back to Spencer Friday night and turned 9000 rpm. Since I’m pretty sure 9k would have left pieces of motor all over the track and it was breaking up and obviously not turning that fast, we went to look for other culprits. After finding some plug, wire, carburetor, and distributor issues and still not fixing it, I ran the heat and had the car shut off entering the pit. After all that it turned out that I hadn’t gotten the positive battery terminal tight enough…

Once that got remedied, the feature went much better. I started off well enough but faded pretty quickly. I think a lot of the problem is my lack of practice and familiarity with the track, I’m getting better but still need to get used to charging the corners and still carrying speed through them. The car seems pretty solid and I need to get more comfortable with it. I’ve also got to fix the cooling issues.

So am I ready for 50 laps with the big boys? I’ve got 980s mounted up for this Friday and I’ll be changing some things to help keep it cool. I’m also going to try beefing up the brakes and making some small changes to the suspension. With any luck it will be enough to survive all 50 laps and stay close to the lead lap.

The car count for Friday looks pretty amazing. We may actually start all 26 cars. Even RoC didn’t pull that many. It’ll be great to see and shows there are cars out there willing to race and maybe with some tweaking of the rules we could pull a few more for regular shows. It’ll be great to be running with Jason and Bri, and Dave again.

Speaking of regular shows, I managed 10th in points at Spencer. It’s a little depressing that you can show up three times and pull that off. I’ll be doing my best to make sure I have to work for it next season.