Putting A Race 5 Speed Into A Streetcar, Step By Step...

Update on the trans post drag week. We went out with a car with a bunch of new stuff and slowly tried to figure things out. We kept chipping away at it and on day 4 we ran a 9.88 at 138mph, i am very happy with the transmission and the way the car is working, we went ahead and put a pressure plate spring in the clutch with more base pressure as we were finding that when the car hooked on a tight track it was driving right through the clutch. We fixed it for the time being with more levers doing drag week. I really like the power force clutch, it is a good unit for what i am trying to do and it has enough adjustment with the levers to get you out of a jamb at the track.

As far as the trans goes, i am going to tell liberty that if they sell one of these to a customer with a streetcar, they should be required to do drag week. Honestly, when i first drove this thing it was ugly, i was pretty worried that i ruined the streetability of the car, it was loud, and i really had a hard time getting the shifter to do what i wanted. By about the 2nd day of drag week all of those concerns were long gone, i can up and downshift this thing pretty well now, i have gotten used to the handle positions for each gear which really makes downshifting easier, and the whine is what it is, it isn't really that bad.

So here is part 1 of the dragweek story, more to come later...

Some pics i took with my camera before the crappy cell phone shots start. I took these a couple weeks before dragweek started.





I started out the trip with a 12 hour drive to pick up my codriver Tim in Michigan, 12 hours turned into about 14 and change, and we got there, and swapped out the clutch cable and the front struts. Big props to Eric at Afco for getting my struts back to me in time to use them on dragweek. By this time it was about 9pm and we went to get dinner, got home, and slept for a couple hours before leaving for St Louis on saturday.

Right as we headed up to bed Saturday night we noticed a couple of hooligans messing wiht my buddies car, so we went to check it out, this is just a small example of the kind of shenanigans that go down at Dragweek. Its a long running joke that everyone calls Slimbos car a monte carlo, so the Ponte Carlo SS was born...


Sunday, Day 0 of dragweek was pretty much drama free, just a long ass day of waiting around while they try to tech in 330+ cars, it was a good time, got to BS with old friends, meet some new ones, and had some bacon.


Cool pic of my buddy mark's monte carlo and my car on the banking after tech...


We also made two test passes, the first one was a throw away, we found the clutch cable to be all bound up. In my tired state of driving 15 hours and not getting a real meal in, i rushed and **** the cable routing up, so we fixed the routing adjusted the air gap and went back out.

When we let the car back down with the air gap actually adjusted right i noticed the clutch was releasing much higher up the pedal, this meant that my microswitch wasnt going to work to deactivate the 2step. Decided to just rev it up and dump it with no 2step and fix the clutch switch at the hotel. That run was a 10.20 with a pretty crappy launch, after the day we had, we will take it, loaded up and headed to the hotel. I screwed with the 2step switch bracket all night and pretty much got nowhere. Tim came up with the idea to activate it off of the DS sensor, great! It took some time to figure it out, I fell asleep behind the laptop trying to figure out how to do it, Tim was using the tablet and figured it out shortly after I went to bed.

Day one, we get to the track and start moving pins around in the ECU to make the 2step work off of the DS sensor, then they call the drivers meeting, so I went to that and Tim stayed to finish the wiring up. I get back, take the car for a quick drive to test it, and the 2step works perfectly. Awesome! Pass 1, the MPH is off, no way the car went over 140. We took the 9.96 and hit the road, my goal was to run a 9.99 or faster every day of the week and i wasnt trying to get greedy. At this point, we had still had 1 lever on the clutch, and the thing left like a radial car, driving thru the clutch just a little bit in 1st gear.

Here is a link to the live feed when I ran that day.
View: https://youtu.be/0uLf0Cbx4Zw?t=2h55m48s


We packed up and headed out to the first drive, here are the two checkpoints from day one


At the second checkpoint we saw Dave and Tina Pierce from the street outlaws show, really nice people, and that truck is no joke. Beautiful Build

The Dragweek survivor kit


Day 2, this would be the most “interesting” day of dragweek for us… We get to the track, and as usual, indy is off the hook, track is killer. We unload quick and hit the staging lanes early, I get the car up on the 2step and let the clutch go, before I know it I am on the limiter, shift second, straight to the limiter, shift 3rd, holds for a second, then right to the limiter. By this point I realize the run is junk and abort it. We head back to the pits, and decide to add a lever. As we are jacking the car up, I see the car move quick and codriver Tim is using some colorful language… , I already knew what happened, dropped the car on the oil pan! I grab a second jack without even looking at it and get the weight off of the pan, put a jackstand under the car and take a peek at the pan, and see it isn’t leaking oil. Phew, dodged a bullet there. I called up my engine builder to see if we were screwed or not, he tells me that by the looks of the pictures it is nowhere near the oil pump, we dodged a major bullet with that one.




Tim was nice enough to sign the pan for me later in the week when he was doing a oil change, haha.


So after I talk Tim off of the ledge we put the levers on it and go back out for another pass. 9.903 at 136mph, the track at indy was so tight im sure it would have run better with a 3rd lever on it, but after the morning we had we packed it up and hit the road.

Here is a link to the live feed when I ran that day. Pretty sure nobody was watching me with Frank in the other lane…
View: https://youtu.be/e0Jiuw3Dx98?t=58m10s


Thats enough typing for today, ill keep the updates coming as quick as i can.