Silver State Classic Challenge - We're heading back for more!

[James OLC]

With 30 days to go and hot on the heals of Steve Rupp's awesome article "Road Warriors" in the September issue of Camaro Performers magazine I'm excited to announce that we're heading back to Ely, NV next month as part of Team Optima for the Silver State Classic Challenge! Optima Batteries was kind enough to invite us back for another blast down Highway 318 and, like last time, I jumped at the chance. Unfortunately, the Silver State Classic will be held the same weekend as the Run Through the Hills so my crack navigator Steve won't be available (he'll be busy hammering on BP down east) so Jimi Day from FM3 Performance Marketing will be in the passenger seat for the weekend. Jimi's run the event a few times as a driver and will be a great help in keeping me on time and focused for the 45 minutes it should take to run the course.

We'll be running the Optima Half Mile Shootout on Friday, trying to better our 136 mph run from May and then the Optima High Noon Shootout on Sunday where we'll find out if we've fixed our 148 mpg engine cut-out issue. On Sunday we'll probably be running in the 120 mph class with a 140 tech speed - we could probably go higher but there's been a lot of work done on the car over the last month and I want to push our luck.

On that note the car has been spending some time over at Turn Key Engine Supply where they have been working on calibrating the ECU and giving us a new tune up that should be pretty awesome when it's all said and done. They found a couple of issues on Tuesday that were working on now and we'll head back next week for some power runs. We think that the 148 mph cutoff was ECU related and should have that issue resolved and we're hopefully going to have a closed loop program that should help us at altitude. We're also changing the transmission out to a new Magnum T-56 from Classic Motorsports which I hope helps on the gearing a bit and gives me a little better comfort in the cockpit. All that combined with some more optimization on the suspension side of things should put us in a really cool place.

If you haven't checked it out yet, Steve's article in this months Camaro Performers does an excellent job in capturing the spirit of the event from our rookie perspective in May. As always, Steve was able to put together a story that gives you a sense of what it was like to be there that speaks really well of the whole event. Like Speed Week out on the Lake, the Silver State deal is really like a grass roots event that brings a lot a characters together for a short but intense few days. It's a lot of fun and I hope that we can represent the Pro-Touring guys well.

If anyone is interested:

Friday September 18th - Half Mile Shootout, Z1Z (0-100-0) and Z2Z (0-200-0) Challenges
Saturday September 19th - High Noon Shoutout
Sunday September 20th - Highway 318 - Lund to Hiko (woo hoo)

and just 'cuz I love this picture:

[WILWAXU]

Great stuff!

[XcYZ]

Great! We're going to need video.

[MaxHarvard]

Looks like a ton of fun

[buickfunnycar.com]

Best of luck James,hope you're faster than ever!

[James OLC]

John - I think we made some good progress at Turn Key on Tuesday but won't know until we head back next week. Progress on the rest of the stuff seems to be going well and I hope will pay dividends on 318.

Plus you only have so many chances to evaluate 148 mph problems in a safe environment

[Ruslow]

If you are going to use the T-56 esp if it uses a .50 6th.you will be at the top of the temp limits with the 140 tech speed.If you plan on going faster plan on putting a pump and cooler on it if you want it to live.Esp if you run 6th.Stan

[James OLC]

Two weeks to go... and we have a long way to go...

The car is back from Southern California and a bunch of progress has been made - after three days at Turn Key Engine Supply we have a properly caliberated ECM and a pretty decent tune from idle to WOT - although we'll have to run without the wideband for now. That's not a big deal for the Silver State Classic and I've always run open loop to this point anyways so that's not going to slow us down at all. Best of Show installed our new Magnum T-56 (thanks to some help from Classic Chevy 5-Speed and Tremec) with a new driveshaft from Inland Empire Driveline. Our charging gremlins have been tracked down and chased out so we should be locked and loaded for the Optima High Noon Shootout on Saturday. The steering upgrades seem to be working and we're darn close to being ready... or at least we were until yesterday...

we've been chasing a driveline vibration since day one and think that we might have found it last night. When the new driveshaft was going in David noted what felt like some excess free play in the rear end so he pulled the center section yesterday. His first indication that things were amis came when he unscrewed the (huge) drain plug... and nothing came out. A little bit of fishing around yeilded some huge blobs of metal shavings... not good a good sign... When the center section came out the carnage was immediately obvious - the differential was completely pooched - to the point that it was actually cracked. Shoot... not a great start to the long weekend.

We should have time to get it fixed - and broken in at least a bit - before we hit the road on the 17th... I hope.

[David Pozzi]

first, out came the plug


Then no oil came out!

Then I got the diff out

[Steve1968LS2]

Man, that's worse than I thought.. yikes!

With that much metal in the mix I bet the gears are toast as well...