Sunday, several teammates attended the once a year all Corvette drag meet at Sacramento Raceway called Vette Magic.

Thanks to teammates :
Ted, George, Kelvin, Bill K, Joe G, Mark R, Dave, Jim M, Wille S, and anyone else I forgot to mention for attending and showing what their Corvette can do on a drag strip.

Teammates have seen e-mails from these teammates as to how their vettes performed.
Weather was about 83 degrees, the wind was coming from our backs at about 10-15 MPH.

Due to about 200 Corvettes attending, we only got two practice runs. Getting the Rebel, my '99 Mallett 435 to hookup has been a real chore.
Sixty foot times have been lousy in the 3 other drag races I have been to at about 2.6 seconds.
The car would wheelhop badly and had zero traction.
I solved the wheelhop by adjusting the Penske shocks to 175 lbs nitrogen pressure in fronts and 125 lbs in the rears and then setting the compression side of rear shocks at soft to allow back end of car to squat and front a tad harder then softest setting.

Being the track is about 300 miles round trip, it allowed me to test the mods I installed over the spring. The water and oil temps stayed at the low operating range of water being 192 and oil never got hotter then 205 degrees and showed the heat exchanger worked as designed even when I stayed in 5th gear at about 90 MPH with the 3.73 rear end gear pulling up the hills here in S.F bay area.
The mods / adjustment to intake airflow temps/volume and fuel tables were right-on.

Using Autotap PCM diag tool, showed zero error codes of any kind and long term fuel table to 1 percent rich was far better then the 8 percent lean condition the engine had before. Getting rid of that lean condition helped keep the engine temps down a bit and the PCM very happy.

The 3 other times at the track, due to constant loss of traction the E.TS had been around 13.5s.


Practice Runs

First run - the engine had been off for about 2 hours and I was the very first car out, thus engine temps were not even at low operating temps.

60 foot was a lousy 2.4 seconds
E.T - 13.32 seconds
Speed - 112.91 MPH

2nd Run - due to the volume of cars, engine had been off for about 1 1/2 before this run and did have closer to operating temps

60 foot was 2.3 seconds
E.T - 12.83 seconds
Speed - 116.75 MPH

With only two practive runs it was hard to really come up with a good dial-in E.T.
I decided for a 12.73

The C5 that I was running against dialed in at 12.51

My Run Their Run

60 foot - 2.20 2.19
E.T - 12.65 12.72
Speed - 117.84 112.40

Thus I broke out and lost. I could have lifted on the gas pedal towards the end of the 1/4 mile and won but I do not sandbag and go for getting there first and not wimping across the finish line.

My goal was to better my times and chopping off 8 tenths of a second and gaining about 5 MPH was a win enough to me but shows that getting this Corvette to launch will require a different wheel size, going with a higher sidewall tire ( ran with 30 series tire) and a true drag race tire.

Most C5s I watched run were in the mid 13s so you can compare that to your model Corvette.

My trap speeds show the car had the power to get into a low 12 E.T and my goal for this season.

That sounds like something I would like to try next year. Maybe I can make it. The last time I bracket raced I lost to a 63 Corvette. I guess that the only fair way to do it.

[ 06-05-2001: Message edited by: wallst. AL ]