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Wanted to throw out a few observation for Billt and any other locals that might be interested.
A friend and I went to Bradenton Motorsports Park and made a few passes through the 1/4 mile today. Maybe today was not a good representation of what you can expect on a normal T&T day, since they were having their bracket series immediately following, but the track surface was beyond perfect. If it were not for the 95 degree temps, it would have been perfect conditions. I was running the camera while my buddy ran his RT truck and you could hear the tires as he staged on the VHT. It sounded as if you were pulling 2 pieces of Velcro apart when he was slowly rolling forward to stage on the VHT.
With Billt's tires, from above, I had planned to lower the pressure to 20 psi to get them to hook, since they were spinning hard on the street, but I never got the chance. I did a small burnout and they stuck like glue @25. I have some video taken on a high speed camera showing that the tires never slipped an inch, not even a squeak. There was a late model 5.0 Mustang GT/CS with a single turbo conversion there and he could not get the car off the line. The car was hooking so hard that it would bog horribly coming off the line. It was one of those days where you could tear your car apart if you were trying to launch hard with a stick.
I guess we all have dreams of going there to humiliate a few unsuspecting street cars, but that was not the case today. There were no regular "street cars" there ... only a few street/track beasts that planned to run the brackets later in the day. My first "victim" was a late model Z-06 with skinnies/MT Drags, open LT headers, cam, etc. He was running low 10's. I must have scared him so bad off the line that he ran from me as if I were tied to a tree. I extracted my revenge and smoked him on the return road so I consider us even ;-) Other than the Z06 and a "stockish" GTR running mid 11's, the rest of the cars were full time drag cars running single digit times on slicks.
I ended up only making 3 passes, botched the 1st pass (forgot the TC on), 2nd pass was the keeper, then the car and track were really hot for the 3rd pass. I popped codes about the 1/8 mile point and the car fell on it's face hard (SES) so I aborted. It recorded a misfire on #6 and knock on 3, 5 & 6 and was running rough as heck. I restarted the car on the return road and it cleared up and ran normal again. Time to pack it up and head home before doing some damage. Ended up with a best of 12.97@107, so I was very happy, considering the conditions.
Had a lot of fun, learned a lot, and will hopefully do better next time ... when the weather cools down some.
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