Big Red hits the track!

KStromberg

Vortech kicked in yo
Well, after owning Big Red for 3 years, I finally got to make some runs yesterday at the track. Having the converter parameter variations on my switch chip proved to be a very valuable tool just short of actually datalogging to be able to find out which setting the car performs best at.

With that said, my first and worst pass was a 12.858@110.66 mph This was disappointing to say the least but my 2.0 short time spinning all the way out of the hole through all of first gear told me that was part of it BUT I didn't like how it felt through second gear because this was on the 2&3 locking tune. So I was faced with a couple choices that I decided to make. With the slicks at 20 psi on this run I decided for next pass I would do a healthy drop of tire pressure down to 17 psi and flip to position 2 on the chip. This would only be locking the converter in 3rd gear. Doing this, the improvement was drastic and instant dropping my 60' time to a 1.80 and running a pass at 12.37@110.82 mph

Here is a video of that pass:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKH43-Hpr-U

Pardon the commentary at the end. I got a bit overly excited and really thought I just might have a chance at a high 11 but it just wasn't happening. :eek: The temperatures quickly rose to higher than I had expected for the day and we were pushing upper 70s close to 80 degrees.

As time went on during the day and the car had fairly consistent cool down times, the ETs proved to be consistent as well. All of my passes for the day were in the 12.3xx until we got to bracket racing in the afternoon. After the longest cool down for the car of the day I decided to think she would run a touch better so I dialed the car in at a 12.29 Having had practice throughout the day to keep the car launching consistent at around 2800rpms and 60' times in the 1.7s I made my first pass and took a win light running a 12.295 on my dial. :cool:

Now this is where the ETs go back up a bit. Cool down times begin to become less frequent as they start pushing the cars through the lanes a bit quicker for the brackets so knowing how these cars heatsoak, I slowly start raising my dial to compensate.

My next pass was a "bye?" pass since I won first round and I dialed the car in at a 12.35 and ran a 12.41 taking the automatic win.

3rd pass in brackets I raised my dial yet again for the heatsoak and dialed in a 12.45 and ran a 12.466

Last and final pass I redlighted. :( I ran a 12.488 on my 12.45 dial but either way I would have lost since I broke out more than the ZL1 Camaro in the left lane.

All in all a good day though and I didn't break the car launching aggressively. :laugh:

The biggest technical piece of information to take away for the day is position 2 commanding lockup in 3rd gear only proved to provide the best ETs for the car. With that said, unfortunately the converter is not locking in 3rd gear at all regardless of the command to do, so a better converter will be needed which I think will prove to provide a substantial improvement. As seen in the video above, she warbles in and out of the clutch at the end of the track and then the TCC solenoid finally gives up and the converter stays wide open for the last couple hundred feet.

One more interesting thing to note, I made only one pass on the completely unlocked tune and ran a 12.380@109.92 mph but this was after only a 17 minute cool down period which was one of the shortest cool down time of the day. So the conclusion to be made is that leaving the converter wide open the whole time is not really affecting the ETs at all or trap speed so this just tells me the converter is THAT bad. Fully locking in 3rd gear like it should, maybe 11s are not so far fetched.

Anyhow, I might make one more track visit this year, but I'm not sure. Cooler temperatures in October would definitely improve my ETs and I think maybe even just that alone would put me very close to that 11.9 mark. But beyond this, a nice billet pro converter will be needed.

Definitely and improvement over Thomas' times. :D

Time trials:



Brackets Pro ET (1st pass new best for Big Red)

 

driller

El Presidente
Nice times Kirk! :)

Red lights happen... if you don't red light once in a while, you're not trying hard enough. ;)
 

KStromberg

Vortech kicked in yo
I'm sending the tune back out today. I'm raising the shift point 300 rpms on the 1-2 shift to bring it to around 6500 rpms. The 2-3 shift had an occasional limiter blip. I don't know why, so I'm leaving that shift point alone but raising the rev limiter probably 100 rpms. I'm not throwing in the towel yet on lockup in 3rd gear but one thing we talked about there is that the lockup may be occurring too early in 3rd gear which he said could cause the symptom I encountered. So I'm going to probably raise the lockup to around 100mph in 3rd gear. We'll see what he thinks once he gets my tune back. Big Red may possibly be on a car trailer headed to Cedar Falls raceway in Iowa on October 24th. The track is at slightly better elevation, the weather is typically much cooler by then, and with these tuning tweaks I have a feeling what the next timeslip will be. ;)

This may not be over yet......I'm hungry for 11s
 
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