Nov 1

Land speed record

adventure, photo Add Comment (1)

So, today we headed into the shop so I could do some research that I had come up here for. We arrived, and noted that Brian’s Dad’s Mustang Cobra was at the shop, which meant he had finally finished the suspension work and it was running. We let that go for the time being, and worked on the project at hand, with great success.

Around 5pm, as I am in the midst of soldering up an adapter board, Brian comes in and says, “Time for a break, let’s go.” He has the keys to the Cobra in his hands. No need to ask me twice. Did I mention that this car is a few steps over a ‘normal’ car? It has a Whipple Charger on it, which is a highly efficient supercharger, and a few other goodies, which push the total power output to over 600 horsepower. Yum.

We head out on the interstate. The latest upgrade is a suspension kit, and Brian was having a lot of fun with how well it could handle. As we went around the long corner from the main interstate to the loop that went past the airport, at 120mph, I thought to myself, “Man, I’ve never been in a car rollover before…” This fear was unfounded, as the car stuck to the ground just fine. But this was just a warm up to what was to come.

We got off the interstate at the “play area” as Brian called it, which turned out to be a lonely exit ramp with a bridge and turnaround to the interstate. Here Brian stopped, and warmed up the tires to get them a little more bite for take off traction by doing a burnout. He then proceeded to rip through the gears.

First gear lasted less than a second. Second pulled pretty hard, and by this time we were about to merge onto the interstate, and saying goodbye to 65mph. Third gear saw us surpass 100. Fourth pushed us up to my current land speed record of 120mph, which I have set on both my motorcycle and my Mustang (both were a hell of a lot more scary at this speed). Fifth gear came along, and with it, 160mph. Brian is yelling out speeds over 80 in 10 mph increments the whole way. We come up on a pickup, a car, and a semi, and as we passed, I realized that we were going past them faster than they were going past stationary objects on the side of the road. Did I mention that the car has 6 gears?

Brian let off the gas at 160, and we slowed quickly due to all the air drag. The boost gauge relaxed back to zero from being almost pegged at the 18psi mark. We exited the freeway again on the next exit. As we got off, Brian downshifted and pushed the gas. The supercharger cruelly dispensed more than 2 atmospheres of air into the intake manifold, and something bad happened: The car began missing.

Brian looks briefly at me. “Uh oh, something is wrong.” He tried again. As soon as he hit 10 pounds of boost, we could hear and feel the miss fire. Came to a stop, debated what could be wrong. Brian felt it might be a hose come loose. Or something far worse…

Last week, Brian blew up the motor in his Mustang. Now, bear in mind that engine was on borrowed time as it was, as he had stuffed a Procharger under the hood on the mostly stock engine, and had slowly put a smaller and smaller pulley on it, increasing the boost. The fun came to an end when after a hard run, it began missing. As it turned out, he had knocked a spark plug for a loop when a chunk of the ring land on the piston cracked off and smashed into the plug. It still ran, but had a pronounced miss at all speeds. He tore the engine down, and found that all the connecting rods were bent, some more than others. This was not as huge of a loss as it might seem, as he was already saving up for a new rotating assembly, and simply moved his schedule up by a week to actually commit to it. What had happened was that the methanol pump had been accidentally turned off, and the engine was run too lean, resulting in too much heat, pre-ignition, and… death.

So, back to the present. He carefully mentioned that his car had done the same thing when it nose dived last week. He went on to mention that Dad was not going to be happy about this.

Well, as you can guess by now, looking at the pictures, the problem turned out to be a simple one. We had melted the electrodes off of half the spark plugs. This was because the car only had 1/4 tank of gas, and doing 160 at full open throttle had resulted in fuel starvation, which melted the plugs. Thankfully, the pistons had not been damaged (as verified by a endoscope). We got a new set of plugs, and the car was back to normal.

Regardless, I have set a new land speed record. One I don’t plan on challenging for a while. 160mph was both faster and slower than I imagined it might be. Plus, I got these neat photos of the aftermath of a lean fuel condition. Check out the splatter of metal that used to be the top of the pistons and the ground electrodes. Very amazing stuff.

Anyway, one more full day here, and then I am headed back home. Hopefully it does not get any more interesting here