The TCI Permanent Magnet Starter turns over the high performance LS3 engine in our Nova with ease time after time. With applications for both LS-style and traditional mouse motors, there’s no excuse for owning a small block Chevy of any vintage that goes “RRRRRrrrrrRRRRRrrrrr” instead of “Vroom!”
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There’s a reason why Auto Meter is the company that comes immediately to mind when racers think “gauges” – five decades of leadership in the aftermarket doesn’t happen by accident. Check out our full install of a set of Auto Meter gauges into Project 666 – our Fox Mustang.
Look closely the next time you’re at the track and you’ll see professional race teams using video cameras as a data logging device. Drag racers use them to see how the car is maneuvering down the track, and the circle track guys use them to see their line. By a large margin, Go Pro’s products are the cameras of choice for recording in- and on-car video for testing and analysis.
Did you ever buy something secondhand that looked good cosmetically, and when you went to repair a minor part you found that there was a lot of hidden damage? That’s pretty much the story of our Project car – The Swinger Nova. In this segment we are going to be replacing the rusted floor pan on our project car with some quality floorpan restoration parts from Classic Industries in our very hot, Southern California PowerTV garage.
The word ’sticky’ isn’t commonly associated with positive thoughts, though in the world of drag racing, it is everything. In the last few years, more OEM’s have been making vehicles equipped with twenty-inch wheels as a standard option. If you have a hopped up daily driver that fits in this category, you have been forced to buy an extra pair of wheels so you can downsize to a smaller drag radial. That is, until Nitto released their 20” drag radials that we installed on our Trailblazer SS. Check it out.
We really like it when sportsman racers turn bloggers. Not so much because they are the next Hemingway, but rather – because they tell it like it is. Chris Parent, Street Legal racer and owner of the BB Nova Racing web site, recently wrote a Top 10 Drag Racing Tips article that is a great “101″ guide for the newbie heads-up racer. In the article, he talks about things like safety, tire pressure, and how to read a track — a good starter guide that I’m sure everyone wished they got before their first trip down the 1320.
We were out at US 131 in Martin Michigan for the ADRL race, waiting for a small clean up on track from some fluids. Extreme 10.5 racer Spiro Pappas and tuning guru Don Bailey walked out on the track with some contraption in hand. Spiro plops a device on the surface and then jumps on it with his knees. Is this some new workout machine for racers? When they pulled it off the surface I saw the rubber-like pad on the bottom mixed with the torque wrench on the top, it clicked – someone made a device that measures traction… Away with shoe stomping and in with the Track-Meter.
Tire technology has improved by leaps and bounds over the centuries, beginning with the use of iron bands that were heated in forges and quenched around wooden cart wheels and eventually evolving into the self-inflating, puncture-proof rubber compounds with which we are so familiar today. Mickey Thompson has been on the leading edge of tire technology and now we got the whole story from the beginning to the future.
When it comes to firing up that brand new engine, you want to make sure everything is just right. After all, the break in period of an engine is the most important time in your engine’s life span. COMP Cams came out with a special Break In Oil that is designed and bottled with the right ingredients to break in your engine and we got all the details.
Safety should always be on your mind when you a build any type of race car. For our Project Grandma, the little old 1000+ hp lady from Pasadena who we expect to run 8s on the quarter mile, we needed to add a nice set of restraints and a parachute to make sure our driver – and our car – make it back to the pits in one piece. To we sourced famous safety-supplier Simpson to supply some of the safety gear for our car.
