Update from Friday night.

Summary
Weighed the car, 2860 without me in it, 3080 with 220 lb driver.
Best time: 60ft - 1.579, 330ft - 4.625, ET - 7.190, MPH - 95.27

Took the car to Brainerd for the first time. They were running a nostalgia race the next day so the track was pretty full. We were hauling the car in the new enclosed trailer for the first time.
Got to the track a little later than we had hoped but they were just getting started so we went to unload the car. As I said, this was our first time loading or unloading the car from this trailer. Some of you may know where this is going.
As we were pulling off the trailer, the exhaust hit the spot where the ramp comes out of the trailer and completely stopped the car. Our trailers have always been narrow ramps, and this was a full back door. We bent the exhaust headers pretty bad and had to take a jack to lift the front of the car just to get it out of the trailer. Lesson #1 learned, we looked at other trailers and need to either park on a more level spot or have an extra transition ramp to keep from hitting the bottom of the car.
Once we recovered from that, we took the car out and ran a 7.19 at 95.27 mph straight off the trailer. Here is the set-up we went with:
1. We switched to 93 octane gas
2. We lowered the jets to 88/87 and increased the squirter to a 35.
3. Timing was 36 degrees at full advance
4. Shift at 5800, rev limit at 6200. We hit the rev limit hard well before the finish line.
5. We did put thermostat in at 180 so the car was running about 190-200 degrees.
We had no stumble at all off the line.

So we were very happy with the run. Figured if we had not hit the rev, we may have been in the 7.0's, so we changed the rev limit to 6400. Cooled down the car and went back out.
This time the car slowed down to 7.48. We tried 3 more runs but never got out of the 7.40-7.50 range. The last run we advanced the timing to 38 and the car slowed about .1 seconds.
The car has been making a kind of loud sound on one of the cylinders. Kind of a loud bang when that one cylinder hits. We inspected the headers, and while they were bent down probably 2-3 inches, we did not see any cracks in the headers. We were so focused on this we really did not get around to making changes to the set-up as we were just trying to get back to where we started the night. We did play with the bias on the brakes from round to round as we had not had a chance to really get them dialed in since changing the fronts to disc.

On the way back home it occurred to us that the first round likely had a mix of 114 and 93 octane. My tank only holds about 2 gallons, so it may have had 1/2 gallon of 114 left in it. Perhaps this was the difference as we ran 93 the remainder of the evening. I know it sounds like we are just terrible testers but this was only the second time out with the car in 11 years, and I was focused on getting comfortable driving again.
On the 4th pass down the track I did come heads up with a new Challenger. I never saw him once we left, so that felt nice!

All in all I was happy with the evening. We did not hurt the car much from what I can tell, and we made 5 passes on a new track. We got the trailer home in one piece, even though it was about 2:00AM before we got in. Brainerd is a 2 hour drive, not like the 30 minutes it used to take me to get to three different dragstrips in NC!

This week and next we are re-wiring the car. (That is another story for another day). We are painting the trailer and getting it organized inside. We plan to check the left side of the car, (pull the valve cover and check the valves), inspect the headers closer, change out the transmission pan gasket with a nice new Moroso Blue one, relocate the transmission cooler to a lower horizontal mounting instead of the vertical position we have it in now. We also plan to run the car a bit and pull the plugs to try to see what they look like. Finally we are going to check the vacuum and make sure it is good and not having leaks.

We are looking at test and tune again in 2 weeks at Brainerd, and then hoping to get in a run at Commerce on 7/24. Still have some safety work to do to the car before we run an NHRA track, but we are very close, and want to run there before it closes later this year.

Next time out we are going to start off with a target of 100-104 octane by mixing 93 with the racing gas I have. Not sure if this will matter, but it really was the only thing we changed significantly from the first round. We will likely swap out the 6400 chip on the MSD as well. Maybe in a month we will have new Hoosier Radial racing tires and see if they help.

A few new questions for the group:
1. What do we need to check on the headers since we hit them unloading the car. Is there any thing we could have done to hurt the car when that happened?
2. Have you ever heard of an MSD chip messing up and hurting your performance. I think these are only there to keep you from over reving and we never seemed to hit the chip once we changed it up to a 6400.
3. What should we check when we hear a loud popping on one cylinder?
4. If the idle is not holding steady, would this indicate a vacuum leak? It was moving between 800-1200 every 15-20 seconds