THE SILVER STATE CLASSIC CHALLENGE!

WE’RE OFF!!!

It’s been a really tough month but I think that we are ready for the Silver State Classic Challenge – a 90 mile long Open Highway race that takes place every September on Highway 318 just outside of Ely, Nevada. We’ll be running with the team from Optima Batteries in the 115 mph class on Sunday. Jimi Day, a Silver State veteran and the brains behind FM3 Performance Marketing will be my navigator for the race and he’s got some pretty big shoes to fill – trying to better our the Camaro’s rookie outing in the spring with Steve Rupp navigating us to a 4th place finish just 0.37 seconds off our mark. I hear that there might be a small wager or two going on behind the scenes but I am focusing on the driving and letting the two of them work things out between themselves.

David Pozzi has been instrumental in getting us ready for this weekend – working tirelessly to prepare the car for the last five weeks (ok… let’s be honest… David got tired of it about four weeks ago – he’s just too nice to say so). Since our trip to Best of Show Coachworks in San Marcos, CA we have replaced the old transmission with a new T-56 Magnum, swapped out the old driveshaft for a new aluminum piece from Inland Empire Driveline, repaired some nagging electrical gremlins and given the car it’s first really good tuning on the dyno at Turnkey Engine Supply. When we got the car off the dyno David became concerned with the rear differential – and rightly so – discovering that the differential was midway through a catastrophic failure. With the help of the great guys at Currie Enterprises we were able to quickly replace the failed Platinum Track for a near bulletproof True-Trac differential and salvaged the aluminum 3rd member housing and 3.89 gear set. David installed the new rear on the weekend and took the car for a test drive yesterday to break the gears in and verify that everything was good to go. Of course… it wasn’t… his critical eye noticing that one of the valve cover gaskets was leaking. A quick trip to the parts store and we are back in business.

David is cleaning up the last few details as I ‘speak’ and we’ll be heading to Ely, Nevada first thing tomorrow morning.

I am going to use this event as a test run for live (or nearly live) updates on our progress through the weekend. Hopefully it will give us some ideas on how best to provide comments from on the road that we can use for the One Lap of America in the spring.  Please check back over the weekend for live updates!

Our first competition will be the Optima High Noon Shootout on Saturday morning where we will try our hand in a one mile top speed challenge. It should be a good indication of our progress since spring – when we ran the event in May we were troubled by engine gremlins that shut us down at a GPS indicated 148 mph… hopefully those problems are behind us – we’ll know in a couple of days.