The trick now will be to keep it that way. :wink2-green
My suggestion would be to concentrate on sustainability and traction. It sounds as if traction is your key demon to conquer at this juncture. Optimize the suspension and weight transfer, find the proper tire and air pressures for the best sixty foot times and practice consistent staging and launch techniques. Don't be so quick to blame track prep for lack of traction. Good track prep should be a bonus, not a prerequisite.
I also still strongly believe a good lockup converter will show significant improvement at the top half of the track.
I totally agree. It is in the back of my head. Let's just say I felt comfortable with the fact that I had a trailer to use. LOL A few things we can examine when it comes to sustainability. I can't say what the car does when I am not actually logging it, but when we did street tune it, my tuner wasn't going to let me leave until I came back with an excellent logging session. He was not in the car when I was doing the logging. He sent me a log file, I uploaded it to livewire so that he could read the PIDs that he wanted to see and basically said, "now go drive it" :laugh: Verbally, he spoke a lot to me about idle, wot, and cruise a/f ratios but I know he was watching much more because I had a list pop up of 20 or so PIDs if I recall correctly. He knew I had a wideband so those specific values I could see. On the final logging run when I got back and sent him the session, he said they look excellent. I had mentioned rpms which seemed a bit high but he had told me that the highest rpm was 6642 rpm. So at this point, we cannot rely on the tachometer.
2 things that would concern any gearhead rocking this stock engine at this point is fueling, rpms, and knock. With the timing advance at 17 degrees and everything else that my tuner had observed with the logs, he told me that the car will never knock in its current state. I fully believe that the E85 and meth is doing an excellent job at this. So next, I feared for the rods a bit as I had expected to be crossing the traps at near 7000 rpms on open converter but that turned out to be significantly less and was at around 6700 "according to the tachometer"so maybe even slightly less in reality.
AF ratios are right where they need to be and are 11.7-12.0 at wide open throttle. This is precisely where the tuner wanted to see them and we hit the nail right on the head here. On pump gas my af ratios were right around 11.5 so we are running a bit leaner. I am no tuning expert so I am kind of trusting my tuner at this point. I do believe he took the lean it out and keep the timing back approach versus adding more timing and richening it up. If this thing knocks, it could be game over in short time. With that said, I still have a wild hair up my ass to try running a wild tune on it for track use only where we could advance the timing several degrees but I haven't decided whether I want to pull that trigger yet or not. The biggest mental battle there is the fact that timing advance will without a doubt make significant improvements in my ETs but might become a reliablility issue internally, particularly pistons. It depends if I want to play with hot lava or not.
Onto the converter lockup. Some mph can be had there but can we be certain that ET will drop in an equal or greater amount? According to the guy who built my car.... not likely. His opinion here is that lockup in 3rd gear will likely create more realistic trap speeds in relation to my ETs. We can certainly agree that my mph is down. Don Pfau was right around 119mph traps with an ET just over a tenth slower than me. He was locking up in 3rd. With that said my builder told me that I would for sure pick up some mph but I may just be surprised to find that the ET may only drop by a tenth or so. I'm already looking at low 11s in better air. I have a hard time believing that a better converter would be enough to put this car into the high 10s. The only reason I mention these figures driller is because I recall you saying awhile back that you had tested unlocked and you lost like a half second. I certainly don't expect those results on this setup. If so, I would be at an 11.04 I just can't see that happening.
Onto the suspension and weight transfer. The car is on factory airride and the height sensors had to be adjusted to full max out back in order to give me enough clearance where I wasn't going to risk ripping my fenders off launching the car. I do believe that the fuel cell over the rear axles helped with weight transfer. This area is gray for me because I still haven't entirely narrowed down what is going on. I tried all over the place with the footbrake which might have led to some of the inconsistencies but at the same time was dealing with street tire cars on the track and mediocre prep which makes it hard to find out what is really wrong. I do believe that I may need to stay well under 3000 rpms on the footbrake in order to keep traction. Perhaps what worked last year, no longer works this year. Also to be considered is the full poly knuckle bushings. Perhaps less deflection there due to the harder material is making it easier to spin but again, I don't know.
So, what to do for this fall? I have a plan somewhat. First of all, I need to get the fiberglass shell seats in the car. Since all others are now removed and I am sitting in just one stock seat, the weight drop there is now just an additional 25#. I would like to gut the dash of the heater stuff which was said to be another 20 or so and do some other things. I may consider running an 11.5# braille racing battery up front and deleting the ac compressor to get another 40# or so off of the nose. I would also like to get my hands on some Lexan and delete the entire sunroof assembly as that will also be a decent amount of weight off. I do believe that it is very conceivable that I could dump another 100# off of this car and with cooler air and nothing else changed could see 11.20-11.30s. Interestingly enough, if I were to take that leap of faith and advance the timing further several degrees on a wild corn tune the car just MIGHT reach high 10 second territory.