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I race my 1968 Camaro in the Sportsman class at Infineon Raceway in Sonoma, California. I no longer use it to drive daily back-and-forth to work, but it's still tagged, registered, and insured for occasional street cruising, and I drive it an hour each way to the dragstrip for the bracket drag races. As of this writing, I've run a best quarter mile E.T. of 11.67 seconds at over 117 mph. I shift it early and do a little de-tuning to slow it down enough to run 12-seconds flat, the quickest I can go in my class. I had hoped to do well racing the new combination once I got it finished in 2008, but I had no idea it would go as well as it did in my first year running it again. After working on the car for over two years, and finally getting it out to the track again for the last half of the 2008 race season, I pulled off the unlikely and managed to finish #1 in Sportsman points at Infineon Raceway in the 2008 Summit ET Racing Series! It was extremely close; I won by only one point, less than a round of racing. There were several people still in contention for the championship coming into the last race, and any one of them were deserving of the title. This just happened to be my year, and the points system worked in my favor to allow me to claim my third track championship title, and the first with my Camaro!
The small block Chevy's 383 cubic inches are fed by a Demon carb on top of the aluminum manifold. This photo shows it with the Edelbrock dual plane manifold, but I've recently installed a single plane to see how that works for my combo. The mixture of air and fuel are passed to the aluminum AFR heads, while the valves follow the bumps of a Comp Cams hydraulic roller cam. Torque is transferred through the drivetrain by a 10" race converter, a 2-speed powergilde trans, and a 4.11 geared rearend. The 3" dual exhaust is kept a little more quiet by necking down to 2-1/2" after the X-pipe and right before the mufflers, and I added some over-the-axle mandrel bent tailpipes that help too. A Little Background Info: I first got the Camaro back when I was in high school, where it served as yer basic to-and-from-school daily driver. Being a typical 16-year old kid who thought he was a better driver than he actually was, my automotive education was literally a "crash" course. Enough said about that. After pulling the orignal inline six-cylinder engine out of this car, and replacing it with the rebuilt V8 from the first car, I continued to hot rod around in it for a few years while I used it to commute to school, and then to work. When I finally took it to the track to race, I was hooked on drag racing for good.
A New Life in California With the help of my step-father-in-law, we towed the Camaro 3000+ miles out here in January 2006, after I finally bought a house with a garage I could keep it in. Ever since then, I've been working on it to try to get it back in running and racing condition. It was no easy task between my full time job, freelance work, and keeping up the house, but in May of 2008, I finally got it out to the track again, and it's been my race vehicle of choice since. What started out as a bad lifter that needed replacing when I brought it here, became a new camshaft, then morphed into a full-on driveline rebuild with a new short block, heads, transmission, and rearend. The list of parts that I wanted/needed to replace became painfully long, especially considering the modest original plans just to get it running and on the road again. Some parts were just too old to trust anymore after being in storage, while others showed obvious signs they weren't happy about being stored unused in the Florida heat and humidity. The rebuild started picking up speed when I got the short block finished back in September of 2006. but things always seem to take more than twice as long as predicted. (At least I hope I'm not the only one...) Below is a quick look at the two-year build up, and my first race out with it. March 2007: The Rebuild After a Year of Work
It took me me SO much longer to get through this project than I had hoped, but it did come together, very slowly.
Above, the new engine and transmission are in, and the drivetrain is close to being all buttoned up. I'm still keeping busy doing all the little time consuming things involved in connecting everything up and getting all the accessories on before tackling the brake system and sheetmetal reassembly. I can only imagine the time, money, and effort it must take when actually doing a frame-off restoration, rather than just the driveline buildup and rewiring that I'm doing here. The more I work on it, the more jobs seem to need to be done, and it's all adding to the total time spent. As you can see, cleaning up the garage took a backseat to actually working on the car... August 2007: The Sounds of Life
I finally started it up in late August, 2007. It's nowhere near done, but at least I know it runs! I eventually figured out that despite my orderly list of things to remember, I had forgotten to hook up the distributor wiring. I realized it when I checked for spark after turning it over a few times with no results. Once that was connected, it fired right up! The light at the end of the tunnel might actually be the end of the tunnel and not an oncoming train! It ran under it's own power (just to go back into the garage) for the first time in over four years... March 2008: On The Road Again!
Most of my time these days is spent just trying to work enough to pay the bills, with not much time left to work on the car. So after dealing with and fixing a stuck valve in the transmission, a cracked rearend axle tube, and a disturbingly large number of poorly made parts, I finally took it out for a real test drive on the street in March 2008. It was just long enough to see the puffs of oil smoke coming from the engine compartment. No big deal though, just some leaky valve covers. I love my Chevy "Power" steel valve covers that I've had for years, but they just don't hold up to the hot oil and crankcase pressure anymore, and I can't get them straight enough on the flange to seal on the heads. So it's down again waiting for some new aluminum valve covers, and a proper crankcase ventilation system I need to engineer and install. While the valve covers were off, I swapped on my good Comp Cams roller rockers from the old engine, then tried to mount the stud girdle. For those of you who are thinking of using the AFR "Eliminator" cylinder heads for small block Chevy, keep in mind that they use a non-standard valve spacing, so the regular Chevy stud girdles don't fit. No one mentioned that the spacing is different on those heads, not even on the AFR web site. But if you want to run any kind of aftermarket rocker system, you'll need to get parts made specifically for these heads. I ordered some new stud girdles specially designed for the Eliminator heads from the experts at Jomar Performance. They're well made and fit great. May 2008 - Finally at the Track!
After more than ten years, I finally got the Camaro back to the track again! Not a big deal to most people, but I've been into racing all my adult life, and this has been a long time coming! By the end of May 2008, I was able to get enough break-in miles on it that I was confident that it was ready for the track. We left as quietly as we could at 6 am. I rolled it out of the garage and let it coast down the driveway to the street before I started it up, doing the best I could not to be "that noisy neighbor with the hot rod." I was really stressed out from all the work on the car the last few days before the race, plus knowing the long drive to the track ahead and wondering if it would make it. I was pretty confident that it would, but my luck with this car has not been stellar. We made it to the track with all the parts still attached at about 7:30 am, and went through tech inspection. I got in line when they called my class. I kept going over the procedures in my head as I got ready to run, because it's been SO long since I've raced this car and there's a bit more to do than when I'm running my Dakota.
I pulled through the water to do my burnout on the fresh new race tires. Doing a "burnout" spins and heats the tires to make them sticky for traction, and cleans any debris off of them that might cause them to spin off the starting line. I pulled up to the starting line. For a brief moment, I considered taking it really easy; I hadn't yet pushed the car hard at all, and I had just changed the oil to the full race stuff the day before. I hadn't even run the engine at full throttle yet. But when it was time to go, I went for it.
The light turned green, and my right foot went to the floor. The car jumped up and forward. It threw me back hard in the seat and held me there, and for a few seconds I got dizzy from the g-forces. (I think it was mostly from the headache I already had.) Again, I considered backing off, but it was going nice and straight, so I kept my foot in it. The early shift point came quickly, and I shifted while I was getting my head back to earth. I kept my foot in it, running it out to the end of the 1/4 mile, laughing and grinning the whole way. I'm so used to all the time it takes for the truck to make a pass, but in this car it was all over very quickly. The end of the track came much quicker than I was used to, so I had to brake hard to make the turn off. It ran great, and too quick for my class. Every measured increment down the track was the fastest I've ever run. Despite setting the timing way back from ideal, and my early shifting to slow it down, it still ran the 1/4-mile in 11.79 seconds. (My Dakota took over 15 seconds.) I had some work to do to slow it down. I lowered the shift point by 600 rpm (I use a shift light with changeable plug-in rpm modules), But the next practice pass it still went too quick, 11.89 at over 116 mph. We were done with timed practice runs, now I had to dial it in (estimate how quick it would go) for the first elimination round. The start is based on a handicap system. Each of the two lanes is timed separately. The slower car gets the handicap based on their dial-in, and leaves first, so in theory, both cars would reach the end of the quarter mile at the same time, based on the "dial-in" written in shoe polish on the windows. I put a 12.00 on the window for my dial-in. I also lowered the shift point again, another 600 rpm. As it turned out, it didn't matter. I left just a few thousandths too soon before the green light, and I red-lit (fouled) away my chances for a round win and another pass. The guy in the other lane did a great job though, and would have been really tough to beat anyway. But it was the most fun losing I've ever had. :-) It was great just to finally have it out there after talking about it for years. Now no one in my class is faster than me anymore. :-) It definitely surprised some people to see me in that instead of the truck, and I hope to be around in the later rounds as often as possible!
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May 18, 2009
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