I won't brag about my results, but all in all it went pretty well. :) I came home with the car only showing damage from the dirt clods up in the cushion. I was in one piece, my engine appears to be in good shape and the suspension handles reasonably well.

Gonna wash the car and reset the suspension, straighten out some sheet metal and should be good to go for some car shows yet this late summer/early fall. :)

Pay off my bills and get ready for 2012.

Here are Saturday's results: http://fairburyspeedway.com/forum/index.php?topic...

And eventually the track photographer should have some pictures up here: http://photosbylu.smugmug.com/FairburySpeedway201...

When I went out for the heat race, the car was no longer trying to spin out. But it wasn't very fast. I couldn't make it turn. And there were no cautions, so the rest of the cars ran away from me during the 8 lap race. I couldn't even see the 9th place car at the finish of the race. But I didn't get lapped, either, so that was good... For the semi-feature, I started 14th out of 15. We had a few cautions, and the track had dried out a little bit more. So I was able to 'race' a bit more with the other cars. I ran all the laps without any incidents. (Had to avoid a few spins ahead of me and things like that, though.) I finished 10th, though there were only 11 cars left at the end of the race. The 11th car had a problem in turn 1 of the last lap and was slow on the backstretch when I went by. Not sure if he even finished the race.

Hot laps the car ran really well. We didn't change a thing for qualifying. But we probably should have done some tire prep. Because when I went out for qualifying, I spun out on my warm up lap. I straightened it out and went ahead and did my qualifying lap, though I ran at about 80% so I would at least record a time. I think the tires had just 'glazed' over after hot laps. I know that now in retrospect, but at the time I was thinking the track must have been drying out and getting slick. So between qualifying and the heat race, Erik and I switched over the suspension from our 'wet' setup to our 'dry' setup.

We loaded up and took the car home. If there was one good thing, it meant we didn't have to wash the car on Saturday morning. :) Instead we just loaded up the coolers and headed down to the speed shop in Pontiac. We dumped 10 gallons of fuel into the car and it fired right up with no problems. So we headed over to the track. :)

We headed over to Sycamore and warmed up the engine. We had lots of people stopping by to check out the car. We figured with our 5 gallons of fuel we could probably turn about 8 hot laps. But unfortunately when we went to go out and run laps (all dressed in my fire suit, strapped into the seat, helmet on) the car wouldn't run properly and had 1 lb. of fuel pressure. We checked the fuel pressure regulator again and the fuel pump, but neither seemed to be the problem. That's when we realized that our fuel tank doesn't get all the fuel out of the bottom. (When we broke the motor on 4/30, we had 5 gallons of fuel but didn't buy any additional since we didn't know when we were going to get back to the track.) The track we were at for hot laps doesn't run cars like ours, so nobody there had methanol fuel - just racing gasoline. So... we were done.

We took Saturday off and went back to it on Sunday. I read those directions I mentioned on Saturday, so on Sunday we had no problem setting the timing. We finished warming up the motor and then set the valve lash. We fired it up one more time to make sure it was operating correctly, then called it a night. I pressure washed some tires during the week and charged the battery, but that was about it. Friday night we bled the clutch and loaded up the car.

Mzs has probably given you the basics. We got the motor, but it took a long time. The new engine builder had a back problem and was flat on his back for a while. Tuesday night (7/12) my crew chief and I dropped in the motor and bolted on many of the accessories. Wednesday, mzs and I put on the headers, bellhousing, starter, trans, driveshaft and radiator. I don't remember what we did Thursday... but I don't think we were able to fire up the motor because it got too late. So Friday we fired it up. We had some trouble setting the timing. Turned out our timing light was more sophisticated than we realized. So after reading the directions on Saturday we got that sorted out. Also on Friday we had a moment where the fuel pressure dropped down to 1 lb. We messed with the fuel pressure regulator, added five gallons of fuel and the problem went away. We changed the oil and tried to refire the motor but were still having timing problems so we gave up on getting to the track that Friday. (7/15).

Not from Hooniverse, but I did get email notification from mzs. ;)

I forgot the url that gets you to the old-school Jalopnik where you can still send private messages. So, here I am to give you an update!

It howls with an angry passion. I love it.

Thank you for sharing this. It was awesome. :) I showed it to my wife. She's pretty lucky my race car only has one seat.