any snow there? Birdtracker

There is a TNT video from SGMP from the weekend and there was some footage of Joel making a pass…….. so I guess he made it
there

I’m not familiar with how his car sounds going down the track, but it sounded like it may have been driving thru the clutch a little.

Do your Moparbilly best to provide great updates!

Be safe, and have a blast, Joel!

Unfortunately, Joel is out of Sick Week. The Heartburn HEMI strikes again. I'll let him fill everyone in with the details.

That sucks....I saw his car in one of the test session vids make a pass...

Bummer

So sad to hear Joel, everybody that has had an event go south understands,,,,,and this was a big one. But never say die!!!!!! Lick your wounds, and rise again!!!!

That's too bad, was looking forward to seeing him run in Orlando on Thursday.

Yes, unfortunately sick week 2025 was over for me before it began. I'm on my way home now, I'll see how much of a report I can get typed before I start falling asleep.

My son Cam and I got down down to the track at Valdosta Saturday morning, as we had signed up for the 2-day test and tune prior to the Monday check-in at sick week. This is the same track where on day 4 of sick week last year, my car lost oil pressure just as I was about to pull into the burnout box. So here was a chance for the car to redeem itself.
Since my old Mickey Thompson ET streets were now 11 years old, I had decided to put new tires on, but those Mickey Thompsons were no longer available. So I had picked up a set of Hoosier QuickTime pros. Back at home I had got them mounted and when I threw them on the balancer one of them was way out of whack. So I ended out up deciding to leave home with Hoosiers on the car, and bring the old Mickey Thompson's with just in case the Hoosiers were unusable.

So Saturday morning after we got the car unloaded, and finished up a a few unfinished tasks like adjusting the throttle linkage and stuff like that, then went up into the staging Lanes where there was a guy doing track tech. The car sailed right through tech.
I decided to take it for a spin on the highway to see how the tires felt. But the roads were so rough, I really couldn't tell. So I went back to the track and started preparing to make a pass.
I hadn't driven the car since a year prior at sick week, so I went through my notes about shock settings and clutch tamer settings and stuff like that.
I was kind of surprised to see that I had in my notes from last year that I had set the shocks much looser for the pass I was about to make when the engine lost oil pressure. And I couldn't find any note as to why. So I decided there must be a reason and checked all the shock settings and set them about six clicks looser than usual. I switched the fuel system over from the street tank and pump to the race tank and pump and checked the fuel pressure on the gauge that I have up on the regulator on the front of the engine. It was just a little bit high so I turned off the pump while I dug out my wrenches to adjust the regulator. When I turned the pump back on, there was zero fuel pressure. I went to the back of the car and could hear and feel the pump running, but it showed nothing on the gauge. We ended up draining the tank, taken apart all of the lines and filters and checking everything and there was no obstruction. I took the fuel pump out of the car, took it apart and there was no obstruction. I pulled the gear rotor out of it and hooked it up to the jumper pack and the motor spun like crazy. I checked the ball valves and everything I could think of, and then put it all back together. Still no fuel pressure. We tried the street pump again and that had pressure up at the gauge. And a light bulb went off in my head! What if the pump was getting enough voltage to spin, but not enough to build pressure?
So I swapped relays between the two pumps an turn on the switch. I went up to the front of the engine and the pressure gauge was pegged, because of me messing with the regulator and losing track of where it was set. I could hear gasoline running and I looked into the carburetors and saw them overflowing fuel inside. So I quickly killed the switch. It seemed that enough gasoline had flowed down into the manifold that I better clear the cylinders before I tried starting it to avoid a potential hydro lock. So I pulled out all the spark plugs. So I did something dumb. I pulled the coil wire off the top of the coil because I didn't want any Sparks to jump between the spark plug wires and ground and light off any gas fumes that might be coming out the spark plug holes. Well a lot more fuel had entered one of the cylinders then I had imagined. When I hit the key to crank it over a geyser of gasoline came shooting up about 15 ft in the air, and all of a sudden a spark jumped from the top of the coil up to the firewall and now I had a 20-ft column of flame shooting up in the air, and it was spreading all over the top of the motor!
I ran in the trailer and grabbed a fire extinguisher, but by the time I got back out a few seconds later the column had burned itself out and there was just a little bit of flame left around the cluster of spark plug wires. Cam was blowing on it and padding at it with his hand and it went out so I didn't need to use the extinguisher. We both looked at each other like what just happened!??
After I finished getting the engine cleared out, and putting everything back together, it started right up just fine.
Since The Hemi had just been freshened and, now it had been dosed with gasoline, I decided that we should change the oil. Also we cut open the oil filter to see what it looked like. I didn't see anything that looked like a problem developing.


So we removed the exhaust and I did a little bit of fine tuning on the fuel pressure, but by now it was too late to make a pass. So we got everything ready for Sunday and called it a day. We were so busy all day Saturday, that we really didn't pay any attention to anybody else or what they had going on, and we didn't watch anybody making any passes down the drag strip. All we knew was what we heard on the PA system.

Sunday morning we got the car out of the trailer and warmed it up. I sat in the car for a little while and went through the whole procedure of how I launch the car, and went through the gears just sitting there stationary. Then I drove it down to the far end of the pits where nobody was, and did some 3,000 RPM launches to get the clutch tamer adjusted. What I do for that is hold the throttle at 3000 RPM, so it's barely getting any gas and then I dump the clutch. The clutch tamer lets the clutch out instantly to a certain point, and then slows it down with a hydraulic cylinder that's like a screen door cylinder, to ease out the clutch. I can adjust the hit point where it slows down, and how fast or slow it comes out once it hits that point. I set it so that at a 3,000 RPM part throttle launch when I dump the clutch doesn't bog the motor or spin the tire at all. It only took about five or six little hits like that to get it to where I was comfortable with it.
I drove back to the trailer and got all my safety gear on and went up to make a pass. Cam got the two GoPros set up, one pointed at the air fuel ratio meters, and one get an overall view of the cockpit and all of the other gauges.
They had one lane prepped for radial cars, and the other one prepped for bias ply slicks. When I pulled into the staging lanes, there was a line of cars in the radial Lane, but no one in the slick Lane. The guy in charge came and put a blue dot on my windshield with a marker and told me to pull up to the burnout box as soon as I was ready. I still had to put my helmet on and finished strapping in.

That's about all I can type for now, I'll get some more done later.

Left us hanging…… Billy is looking down smiling. I can hear his chuckle and saying “well played Joel….. well played”.

Probably saw a squirrel, and wasn't intentional.

Sorry, it wasn't intentional. I'm on the long drive home, and when I stopped for the night last night I was just too tired to write anything.. I'll be home tonight and get something posted.

👍 👍

I just uploaded that video to youtube. That was my 2nd test pass, and last pass. It was crazy. I forgot to adjust the clutch tamer so it was basically not there, just a clutch dump, I had the shocks way too loose, and I got positioned outside the groove on the starting line. The front and rear tires bounced off the track. but yet it was the quickest pass the car has ever made at 10.04 @ 134.

Getting back to the first pass:
After the burnout, I went up and lit the pre-stage bulb, stepped on the brake and pushed in the horn ring with my left thumb. That activated the line lock and the 2-step. Then I waited 50 seconds for the other guy to pre-stage, then stage. I was planning to bring the RPM up against the 2-step, bump in, and be ready to simultaneously dump the clutch, mat the gas pedal, and release my thumb from the horn ring the instant I saw yellow. But that is not how it happened. As soon as the other guy staged, the green came on. I don't know how or why, because I don't think I staged. But maybe I did. So I just matted the gas and dumped the clutch. I don't think the rpm was up. But it ran a 10.34 at 132.

Joel did you have a clutch tamer in my 67 GTX ??? I've never heard of it and now you got me looking up info on it ...

John, I did not have the clutch tamer on the GTX when I was racing in fast. I don't think they had been invented yet. I'm kind of curious as to what I could have accomplished with it. When I raced the Hemi coupe at drag week 2018, I was using a McLeod adjustable soft lock clutch, switching back and forth between Street and Race. That was a lot of work, plus the wear on the discs during the street drive threw the adjustment out of whack.
So for 2021 drag week I used the clutch tamer. I really like it. It can all be adjusted right from the driver seat by turning two different knobs and there's nothing electronic about it. But I messed up the installation because I didn't understand the instructions. There is supposed to be some kind of detent ball with an o-ring or something to keep it from rattling out of adjustment. I didn't get that right, so it keeps moving. I need to fix that, but meanwhile I just readjusted the correct number of turns when I'm in the staging lanes. I forgot to do that for my second pass at sgmp and it had rattled all the way back to zero on the return Road and driving around the pits.

That is a very astute observation! I had the clutch tamer set to allow for too much slippage upon re-engagement. What it does is controls the release of the clutch pedal. Since I use the clutch to shift, the misadjustment was noticeable on the shifts.

Did I miss the reason you dropped out?
What broke / happened?

Orlando was PACKED yesterday, fullest I've ever seen the parking area.