I always cut them open, but never wanted to see anything.
With less than three weeks for the second race quickly approaching for WCHR Outlaw8.5 headsup racing it will be close!
Luckily we caught it before anything went horribly wrong. It might just need new bearings.
I really can’t complain as I built this engine over 6 years ago!
I honestly can’t guess how many passes are on these bearings, along with the thousands of street miles of abuse it has seen.
Hoping to have the engine out this weekend and we can assess the damage.

In the mean time, other things that I have done; I talked with PTC and we agreed that tightening the converter was needed, the ATI Superglide had developed a pretty gnarly shift flare on the 1-2 shift, so what better time to fix it.
I plan on swapping out the 3.89s in the Fab9 for the 3.25s that we ran last year, hoping this will help the 60ft issue some.

With zero previous experience with this tire, our first pass trying them out was our first qualifying pass for the event. We went out with a fairly aggressive boost curve in the car, and what do you know, up in smoke. Ran a blistering 8.769 @ 95 mph in the 1/8!!!!

Second qualifying pass we stepped the boost way down and tried to get down the track again. 7.48@71 mph. Car went about 50 feet this time before blowing the tires off. As i cruised down the return road, I thought, wow this is going to be interesting once eliminations start.

Going back looking at the data, and how slow little boost we ran, I decided that I had no choice but to start from scratch. As slow as I could possibly get the car to run-No boost. Well that isn’t necessarily possible, without taking the turbo off. So we ran the next best thing, open wastegates. But our next pass is the beginning of eliminations. We qualified last, so we have to race #1 qualifier. Luckily for us, he was not going to be able to make the first round of racing, so this gave us an opportunity to try our the open wastegate idea. This time the car went down the track never spun at all and went 6.80@105. Definitely not our fastest pass, but that is our baseline.

Our next round of racing we had a bye, so we can increase the boost and slowly ramp it in and see what improvements are made. We aim for 20# of boost and ramp it in over 3 seconds to see how the tire will take the increase in power. We run a 6.35@126. That won’t win any races nor set any records, but that was good to see. The car spun tire off the hit, could be too much power, could be track prep. But we can look at the data and see what to do for the next round, the finals!

We decide to stay with the slow and steady technique for the boost curve. We are in the finals at this point and are getting more data as time goes on. I stay with the same boost curve, just ramp it in sooner and add more boost at the end of the ramp. We run a 6.15@132 and its our best pass of the day on these tires, but not enough to take the win light.

The weekend was great, we went from a 8.76 to a 6.15 in 5 passes, only to get faster as we get more and more data on the tire.

I would like to thank some of my sponsors who have really helped out this year, and without them I don’t know if I could be able to race at the level I would be at today.

Joe and Pete at Precision Turbo.net
Dudlee at BatteryStoreOnline.com
Donny at DadsCustomIntercoolerTank.com

Also thanks to my wife, crew, and friends who have helped me throughout this journey.