The curse of Irwindale….. warmed the car up, headed to the lanes. weather was phenomenal and I was a bit nervous as I’d only made 1 other ”ok” pass there once. staged the car, ambers started coming down, got on the brake and poof! The engine died along with a small carb backfire…… which caught my UNI filter element on fire. Of course pin on hood Quik latches it wasn’t coming off easy. They ended up dousing it with water….. towed back to the pits, pulled the carb (full of black melted goo) pulled the plugs, cleaned the engine of water and fogged the crap out of it with WD40. It was at that point I just loaded up and headed home…. Would have liked to have hung out and watched but the thought of any moisture sitting in my piston rings was a hard no! So at 9pm we hit that glorious LA traffic and headed east. Finally in the high desert I was able to set the cruise on felony and i had the trailer in the side yard at 1am. Still drunk from sleep/food deprivation I grabbed a beer and tore the carb down. With some decent chemicals and my small brush assortment I got the carb cleaned up and crashed at 3am. 8am I backed the trailer in the garage and unloaded the car and got to work. Checked the valve lash cold all similar, rotor cap (all new in September) was all good. No excessive play etc… phasing good. threw in a set of plugs and fired her up. Almost seems to idle better but that’s probably the placebo effect of having the carb apart ;). So now…. What caused it? i haven’t been using my Racepak as the card reader on my laptop died. Would have been interesting to see rpm signal. Valve hang? wasn’t that violent of backfire….. to me it was like the Ignition shut off. Hard to prove at this point. So now we’re going to reevaluate
our air cleaner and possibly consider having a spare carburetor to have on hand.
