Here we go again.....

After being somewhat encouraged in Columbus, (The encouragement came from the fact that we got a little better in each of our runs.) on Wednesday, we took our engine to the Dyno to find out whether our problems (not running as fast as we thought we should) were related to the car in some other way; like the converter, or our transmission gear ratios, rear end, or the engine.

The drive took more than three hours, and we arrived around 8:30 in the morning. This obviously meant that we all got up pretty early. So we started out pretty tired. But we were still pretty excited that we were going to finally get good info about the car.

We got all hooked up on the Dyno, ran the engine and found out that we were simply just not generating the horsepower that we thought we should be generating. We have done the math, and have a pretty good idea of the horsepower being generated by some other drag pak cars. It takes a certain amount of horsepower to move a certain amount of weight. Pretty basic stuff.. And based on our calculations, we knew that we were quite low on horsepower.

Naturally the question now becomes; Why are we low on horsepower? The day ended with no good answer. We tried a coupleof things on the Dyno, including swapping our cam out for a more conservative cam. Still, nothing good.

So, we left the Dyno and went home. We surely were not feeling very good about things. We were physically tired and very dissapointed. Our dreams of a competitive car appeared to be dashed. So the drive back to the shop was pretty quiet.

Back in the shop the next day, the next day, we kept looking for something... anything that might explain our low output. With a weak Dyno report in hand, we imagined some pretty drastic issues. We considered that our heads may not be up to the other cars, or might have an issue that caused crossflow from the intake to exhaust due to the angle cut of the valves. The suggestion was that we try a couple of different heads. And fortunately we do have another set on our spare engine.

After a couple of hours more effort on Thursday, we did find a couple of things that we think might help a little. But we will have to wait until Maple Grove on October 7-10, 2010, to see if we made any difference.

There will be four DP Challengers at Maple Grove, and if things work out as they should, the four Challengers stand a chance of winning class in AA/SA, A/SA, B/SA and C/SA.

Based on the horsepower now factored on our car, we are now a natural "B", so we can run A/B/C. But, unfortunately we can no longer run D, E, or F, where we started with this car/engine combination.

We are now a bit more encouraged as we think that we can now be consistent with the car. How fast we can go is still a wide open question, but at least we think that we can now get down the track.

Keith Lynch, our driver, is also a pretty good mechanic and has put our last two engines together. Working with him has been great, as he knows the right way to put things together. But the engine is only as good as the sum of the parts, and we still really don't know if the combination is as good as what others have. Regardless, as a driver, Keith is a two time World Champion, so we are confident that whatever the car gives him, he will get the most out of it.

David