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The results were immediate and rewarding. I went out to CFR that night for a T&T just to try the brakes. I figured even if the track conditions were poor I would still be able to test my hot new brake setup. They were awesome! I could mash the throttle against the 2-step at 3500 rpm with confidence as the car would not move a millimeter! Thinking back on the various occasions this season that I screwed myself by rolling the start about makes me sick. It just goes to show you don’t always have to spend big bucks to make a worth while improvement. Twelve stinking dollars…. man.

Next on the agenda was the pursuit of a ten second time slip. I went out to CFR a couple more times and worked on jetting changes for the BG Speed Demon 650 and ended up making an improvement by not only jetting richer, but by removing the front power valve and “square jetting” the carb the same front and rear. I ended up improving the mph by a solid half of a mph, apples to apples, and felt pretty good about it. I also felt I was a little on the rich side, but I left it that way anticipating the upcoming fall weather. I tried different shift points and found the engine liked seeing 7000 rpm on the shifts, I tried launching at 4000 rpm and once again found the limits of my drum brakes and decided 3700 rpm was the limit, and I removed my extra ballast which got me down to 10 pounds over the minimum 3170 lbs. for I/CM .

I was ready for the United Sportsman Associations fall S/SS race at Tri-State Raceway in Earlville, IA. This has typically been the race to attend in the area when October rolls around because the weather can be real good. This also was the race at which I broke the cylinder block the first run last year. I wasn’t too worried about that this year however because I was armed with the Moroso main cap girdle and it hadn’t broken so far! We ended up having some good air but not the “killer” stuff I was hoping for like we had 2 years ago. We also had a damn miserable cross head wind to a direct head wind all weekend. Oh well.

As the accompanying photos show I did have my best ever 60 foots at 1.426 and managed some BIG wheelies with the front tires touching back down to Terra Firma at the 59 foot mark! Man is that FUN! I ran a best of 11.13 @ 118.92 mph. My index is a 12.15 in I/CM so I was finally 1 second under but if you remember when I first built this combination last year the index was 12.35. IHRA decided a couple of months ago to “hit” ALL of the Crate Motor indexes by two tenths apparently because they could. I guess I could have put Muscrate on “kill” and dropped some oil out of the pan and iced the intake but we only had one more run before eliminations and I wanted to win some money.