What a f***** week. Here is a quick run down of events. I could write a 4 page essay on everything that happened but this about sums it up.

-14 hour drive, arrive in Battle mountain
-pass tech inspection first time through
-sheer 2 HS rocker arms and trash the widnage tray in the valve cover on practice run but was still able to run 150mph on 7 holes.
-With ALOT of help from other competitors, come up with 2 factory rocker arms and pedistol. Do field surgery on an LS1 in hotel parking lot. Car runs great.
-Jim Macklaviane (sp) from GM high tech performance does a photo shoot on Mine and Bills car for future magazine article.
-Wife gets to navigate for a friend in a faster class.
-Car runs flawlessly over first leg of race.
-Run into a rain storm at 140mph on the race slicks, had to drop car to under 80mph just to keep it on the road.
-once out of the rain we lost a TON of time. Had to keep the car at 150mph over the rest of run.
-rain caused 3 other cars to slow down. next thing you know, you have a 63 galaxie, 65 dart, 96 vette and myself doing 150mph fender to fender passing each other and going through corners in a pack. That was a fooking BLAST!
-cross the finish line at about 149mph but still 5mph slow overall.
-pull into turnaround point, rear end pinion seal is completely out of the rear end and is puking all of its fluid onto the ground. After alot of direction and help from others we get the seal back into the rear end and are ready to make the return run
-the #8 studebaker comes off the road at over 180mph and the race is called and scored after only the first leg.
-since we didnt get the return run to make up the lost speed we ended up taking 6th out of 9 in the 130 class.
-Wife ends up taking 2nd place with Craig Homechick in the 145mph class. And is making sure to rub my nose in it.

Oof....sounds like a standard race weekend. Drive car, break car, patch car together, car still goes fast, pull all hair from head, tow home.

Glad to hear that you made it home in one piece. I'm guessing the Harland Sharp rockers are not the hot ticket after all? Why did it break, any ideas?

SaWeet!

HAHA

You beat me to it......my STANDARD weekend!

Ouch! It's not fun unless you break something, right?

When you say the Studebaker "left the road" you mean he lost contact with the road?? If that's the case, damn, it's time for more downforce!

One of the studs sheered and thats what caused the rocker to come off. I called harland about it today and they want to charge me for replacements. LOL, get fucked! the guy even admited that the first batch of bolts they used werent as strong as the second ones. It was OBVIOUSLY what caused the problem and they want me to pay for replacements. These will be coming out of the car and I will be going to Jesels.

Here is a link to the site that has a few pictures but 5 or 6 of them have all the HS rocker arm pics.
http://www.imagestation.com/album/?id=4286380569

I didnt take alot of pics because I was to busy on the car and needed to focus on driving. My buddy that went with me is a photo journalist and took over 30 rolls of film and 2 hours of broadcast quality vid on his 4K dollar video camera. He also got fly by vid of the studebaker about 2 minutes before it crashed at 198mph (thing sounded like a rifle shot going by). It was hard to believe that last year I was navigating in that car at the same speed. And he also got fly by of Todd Carpenters UNL. class 95 camaro at 219mph. He was about 30ft from the road when they went by. To give you an idea of how fast that camaro is, they seperated the UNL class cars by 3 minutes. By the time the studebaker hit the first speed trap where brandon got the vid (about 50 miles into the run) Carpenter was only 28 seconds behind the stude


Believe it or not, what caused the studebaker to come off the road was CRICKETS. Yup, crickets. "Mormon Crickets" as they are called infest the entire area. MILLIONS UPON MILLIONS of them. in the mornings and evenings it is especially bad. entire sections of road covered in crickets as big around as your thumb. He was in a corner above 180mph and hit a patch of them causing him to go sideways and right off the road. No amount of down force would have saved him (he did walk away). Not like he needed it though, the car has a top fuel looking spoiler on the back of it.

Forgot to mention how well the car handled.

This thing was like it was on rails. The LG coil overs were FLAWLESS over the entire run. anywhere I pointed the car, thats where it went. It was almost scary how smooth it was at 150mph, through corners and over dips and bumps. There were a few coners where we saw .6 G's and the car didnt even flintch. .6 doesnt sound like alot to most of you track guys but when your at 150mph in a corner, .6 might as well be 1 full G. I did a full inspection of the mounting points......NOT A SINGLE SIGN OF STRESS.

I really have to hand it to Lou, he built one bitchen set up and I was nothing but grins going through those corners. I was pulling at least 15mph more speed or higher through all of the corners than just about any other competitor in my class.

Insane!

Crickets? You mean they don't have a good friction coefficient?



Wow, nice customer service. The manufacturer admitted the problem, yet they won't rectify the issue. I'd make sure he knows that 2 rockers & a new set of bolts cost him any future purchases.

Can't wait to see some of that video your friend got for you!

I am a mod on LS1tech also. And right now there is some talk in the mod forum about trashing them on the board there. There is enough traffic on that site that it could seriously damage thier sales on LS1parts. I just don't want to get into a pissing contest with anyone. I have been through enough headaches in the last week.

Did the seal get burned up? the rear end must get really hot running at 150+ for extended periods of time-do you have a cooler?

Anyways-sounds like a blast.

BTW, I'd go ahead and blast HS-they deserve it for admittingly stating it was defective and refusing a replacement.

Wow.

What an adventure! Who needs Disney Land...

Funny, I was just reading Car and Driver that has the GTO that they ran on Silver State...run (or race, Speed, whatever it's called).There's a picture of one unassuming, blacked out 4th gen LT-1 Camaro that ran over 200mph. Impressive. And a crashed out 350Z, a freakin' dually...

Can't wait to see the pictures and the vids.

The heat made the pinion support expand and it spit the seal out. I don't have a cooler on the trans or diff yet. Those are the 1st priority before the next race.

There is nothing unassuming about that car. 650+rwhp 428ci, sunset racecraft, carbed small block that will turn 9 grand. 5 stage dry sump, more cage in that car than you can find at a zoo etc etc etc.

The car belongs to a good friend of mine. He went through the speed trap at the PE130 at 219mph and was still accelerating.

Called and spoke with the owner of HS today about the issue with the rocker stud. He said he is going to replace them at no charge. I guess sometimes you have to go to the top of the food chain to get stuff done.

But, will you put them back on the car?

don't know yet. Randy is also sending me some other parts to test for fitment. On one hand I am looking at it saying, all the others held up fine. It was one bolt that broke, not rocker arm failure so to speak. On the other hand I am looking at the jesels and saying "expensive but if NASCAR uses jesel, something must be good".

.....only costs TWICE AS MUCH to do it right...

can you give us some feedback on water and oil temps durring that run?

NattaSS Inc. ? you out there?

Sorry was out of town for a family reunion.

Had a couple issues with the water temp but they are pump related. The meziere will be coming off the car. As long as the RPM's never went above 5 grand the temp stayed in the 180-190 range. As soon as it went over 5 grand the temps would creep up to 200. The radiator worked great, the pump however, didnt. I will be going to an evens pump as soon as I can sell the Meziere.

I never was able to get and oil temp sender in the oil. The gauge was in the car but not hooked up. Chances are that if the water temps were at or close to 200 oil temps werent to much higher. Bill Springer was there in his WS6 and ran in a faster class than me and is also running the LG radiator. I think he said his oil temps never got above 220.

nice. guess that LG radiator may have been worth the cost and hassle to install.

I ran in the 168 tech speed class and in fact was running at near WFO@172 mph at 6100 rpm for a period of time so we were running it very hard. We were in DQ territory and didn't even know it until I checked the in-car vid later I crossed the finish line with my engine water temp at 185f. engine oil temps were 240f. , transmission ( M6 with no cooler ) was at 240f. , and my diff temp was 237f. exactly. The diff temps were well over 150f. cooler than it ran without a cooler. I'm especially proud of the diff cooler I fabbed up for it. It worked perfectly, actually much better than I had hoped for. You may remember my little write up a while back about my diff cooler project.

All in all the LG "Supercool" radiator worked as advertised in a very hostile environment and only now do I consider all question marks about it removed. It's one very nice piece and definitely the best setup out there for our fbodys.