I made the trip to LVD from Maine Labor Day weekend, because we only have 2 1/8th mile tracks here in Maine, and I prefer 1/4. Love the facility. I bought my Dart from a guy who lives just across the state line in CT. He's a regular at LVD. Between him and his brother in law, who built the engine, we thrashed on that car both days and finally got it running close to it's potential. We discovered that the torque converter isn't flashing anywhere near the rpm it's supposed to, and he's going to take care of that for me over the winter.
Car was running 10.80s all weekend (and breaking up at the top end of 2nd & 3rd gear) which is way off from where it should be. After checking valve lash (and finding/correcting one potentially disastrous issue with a push rod adjuster) timing, crank trigger pickup gap adjustment, cleaning oil that had somehow found its way into the distributor cap, ditching the cheap autolite plugs and installing the proper NGK plugs and re-jetting the carb we felt we had covered everything. By this point it was first round of eliminations on Sunday, and having no idea what it was going to run, I dialed my previous 10.86 time run. Of course I broke out by a mile with a 10.55, and that was getting out of the gas well before the first light in an attempt to save the round. The car launched better and ran clean, so I was very happy about that.
Planning on going back the weekend of the 28th. Looking forward to it.
