Cecil County Dragway: The trip that almost wasn’t… And probably shouldn’t have been…
June 3, 2002

Rising Sun, MD -- As I’ve said before, I’m an eternal optimist. But the week leading up to the Maryland race sucked. For the whole week, I just wanted to get to the track, belt into the car, slam the door, and forget about everything. But the reality of it would be, I traded one set of difficult circumstances for another. It was just another trying weekend at the race track. We would work over nearly every square inch of our car this weekend… Head lights to tail lights, roof to rubber… The only item in our car that wasn’t brought under scrutiny was our Hutch built transmission.

We almost didn’t make it to stop #5 on the NMCA/NSCA Super Series trail. Just a few hours from home, we noticed the unmistakable smell of burning oil. Tim immediately dove off the freeway into the first truck stop we could find. Oil was pouring out from under our truck and upon lifting the hood, there was so much oil slopped all over everything that we couldn’t tell where it was coming from. Things looked bad! Tim shut the truck off and we allowed it to cool. We pulled a hand full of rags and a few cans of brake-clean, the nectar of the racing gods, from the trailer. The engine was hosed down, wiped off, and re-started. We immediately located the source of the leaking oil. It was coming from some broken o-ring on some fitting on some doo-hickey at the top of the engine, some where near the front. I rifled through our handy-dandy box of o-rings and found the perfect match. Tim completed the fix, topped off the oil and we were back on the road to Maryland.

I don’t have particularly fond feelings for the Cecil County facility. No paved pits, a wavy racing surface, and a questionable left lane timing system. Not to mention, last time we were here we never made a single pass due to new engine blues. If you recall, a valve train failure would ultimately end that weekend.

But that was then, this is now…

Our crew chief, Jeff Prock of Applied Nitrous Technology, would be back in the director’s chair this weekend. The car was prepped and ready to go so that as soon as Jeff arrived from the airport, we could make the most of the Friday evening pre-race test session. We had just come off our promising Norwalk test session, so I was eager to get on the track. As evening approached, you could smell the rain in the air. I love that smell, but not when we’re trying to race.

It had been hot & humid all day and the quality of the racing surface appeared some what questionable. Word had it in the pits, some of the cars were sliding around a bit out there. I pulled our car on to the track wondering what was in store. A few seconds later, I would be aborting a tire hazing, fish tailing run… Come on! I can’t believe this!

Our problems continue… Jeff was baffled, yet unfazed. Now we’d be under the gun to make changes and get the car on the track again before the rain set in. After a mad commando thrash in the pits, we were back in the staging lanes. The track officials urgently motioned me to pull forward for our run. Rain was seconds away… But hopefully seconds would be all we’d need. Hopefully as little as 7.7 seconds…

I was sitting just feet from the start with the car running when the first rain drops appeared on the windshield. The starting official made the dreaded slashing motion across his neck to signify that we weren’t going to be making anymore runs that evening. We’d be headed into qualifying with a car that wasn’t yet sorted out. If it were any consolation, at least we’d have three more shots at it during Saturday’s sessions. We loaded our car into the trailer and headed for the hotel. On the way, we discussed our plans for Saturday.

For the first round of qualifying, Prock elected to leave the car the way it was from our rained out test pass. We needed to find out if we were headed the right direction with the set-up. As soon as the car left the staring line, I could feel that familiar vibration in the rear of the car… It was on its way to blowing the tires off yet again so at that point, I pulled a gear and prepared to lift. When I short shifted, the car settled and the engine RPM was, surprisingly, sweeping nicely upward. So what the heck… I stayed with it and completed the pass. I knew the numbers were going to be ugly, but at least we’d qualified in the middle of the pack and not dead last. It ran an 8.06 at almost 179 MPH. Ugly, but it did land us in the #4 slot for the time being.

The fact that the engine would pull second gear even after short shifting indicated to Prock that we had a lot of power. Maybe even too much for the track conditions… It was now time for Plan-B, a rear gear change. When he gave his orders, he added, “…don’t worry if we run out of time before second round. We’ll skip it if we have too.” Tim and I just laughed. “Come on! We’re not that slow. It’ll be ready…” As Tim and I executed the gear change at the back of car, Prock was handling the usual maintenance up front. All of the necessary work was completed in plenty of time to make the second round.

The gear change did little to help our situation. When we reviewed the video, you could barely tell we’d made a gear change. The car labored and slowed to an 8-something at a-hundred-and-some-odd MPH. No improvement on our qualifying position. The result wasn’t nearly as promising as we had hoped. In fact it was disappointing. Especially when our post run inspections revealed that we most likely a nicked piston.

Get the hook…

Needless to say, we’d be missing the final qualifying session. We immediately proceeded to remove the engine and tear it down. The #6 piston was just slightly burned in it’s usual location outside of the intake valve relief. OK... Maybe the gear change wasn’t such a good idea but big deal, live and learn. We had to try something… Things weren’t working the way they were…

The tear down, repair, and re-assembly were completed in a few hours. The engine was shuttled out of the trailer and bolted back into the car shortly after. The re-installation went very quickly and smoothly thanks to the assistance of L/S heavyweight Rob Wells and his Father. Thanks for the help guys… I owe you! One of these days, it’ll be dinner on me. Anyhow… The five of us had the engine in the car and ready to fire in about a half hour.

The whole time we were putting the engine back in the car, Prock was thinking about the drive line and suspension set up. Eliminations were tomorrow and we desperately needed to get a grip on the race track. Prock was experimenting with our spare shocks while Tim and I were putting our stuff away for the night. Jeff jumped down out of the trailer and asked if we were in a hurry to leave. We’re were dirty and tired but it was early yet so if there were other things that still needed to be done, let’s get to it…

Piece by piece, we pulled the rear suspension apart looking for anything that may cause a bind in it’s motion. A cracked weld in a tube or bracket, a bent tube, a seized rod end, anything… But we turned up nothing… Jeff then rechecked the shock adjustments where he did find some discrepancies. Corrections were made, others were blamed…

The car was again loaded into the trailer and we were back to the hotel by a little after midnight.

Sunday morning I strolled up to the control tower to review the qualifying sheets and elimination brackets. Our 8.06 qualified us in the #7 position which earned us the #10 qualifier, veteran nitrous racer, Joel O’Donnel for the first round. At least it wasn’t Cheffer... But Joel is Cheffer’s teammate, so it was close…

Before eliminations began, Prock dashed the tune up with some fuel and had Tim and I change the rear gear again. Not long after the gear change was completed, the announcement was made for first round.

For our lane choice, we selected the right lane. That was until the Catalano entry blew the tires off and shattered their quarter window, showering glass on to the track. The right lane wasn’t looking so good anymore. After watching that all go down, we exercised our option to take Joel’s lane. We were now lined up in the left lane. After the glass clean up was finished, we pulled forward to the starting lights. At the start, I carded a nice .469 reaction time. I’m lucky I did because a few feet down the track, the usual trouble began. I didn’t even look at the tach; I just shifted and hoped for the best. Somehow, we managed to stay ahead of Joel to collect a first round win. Our 8.09 was enough to hold off his 8.19. It wasn’t pretty, but it did get the job done.

For the second round, we’d be facing the #2 qualifier, New Jersey’s Anthony Di Somma. Even though he had also burned a piston in qualifying, his numbers indicated he had the set up figured out. We put a tune up into the car that is normally very fast… In cold air at sticky track… Neither of which we had… But we had nothing to lose, so we went for it. With this tune up, there would be no middle ground. It would either fly or flop. And flop it did… The car severely smoked the tires and when I shifted, they didn’t settle, they just smoked harder and faster… I aborted the pass and took the defeat.

For the ride home, I debated our next move. Back to Norwalk or completely rip the car apart, have all of the suspension components sent out for testing, and rebuild it one piece at a time? We elected to do the latter…

At one point this was a car that would go down any track, at anytime, under any circumstances, and it would do it very quickly. Now it just doesn’t want to do things like that any more. It used to be that we rarely had to work on the suspension. All of our energy was focused on keep the motor healthy and getting it healthy again when it wasn’t. The suspension would always take all the power we could throw at it. That’s not the case anymore. Suddenly, our suspension set up has become very finicky at best and on the other hand, it’s just quit working all together.

OK Ted… So what do you think has happened?

The short version… Too much power! What? How can that be? Well to begin with our new ET Performance cylinder heads are time and time again proving that they are producing big power. The Norwalk test session proved that. The tune up we used is fairly conservative and typically would produce mid-to-low 7-eighty performances. Under similar conditions, Our ET performance headed engine was cranking out mid-to-low 7-seventies at record setting MPH. Not bad for conservative, wouldn’t you say?

I think we’ve just out-powered our car’s suspension threshold. But as a precaution we have completely stripped the car of its suspension. All of it! Front and rear… We’ve sent all of the shocks and spring out for testing. We’ve also inspected every square inch of the suspension mounting components looking for bent or cracked pieces. I’m happy and unhappy to say I found no problems. Happy because that means nothing will need to be replaced. Unhappy because it means that we have no definitive reason for why our car isn’t working right now. Once the shocks and springs return, the car will be reassembled with a base line set up. Our car will practically be new again. Desperate times call for desperate measures…

So here we are at the mid-way point of the ten-race season and so far it’s been a roller coaster ride. I will admit I haven’t been getting much good sleep over the last few weeks.

After Cecil I was pretty well ready to quit. For the last three events we’ve been mired in mediocrity and it’s wearing on me, my brother, and the whole crew. Moral is down. But Prock sees it differently, as he has said before, “…don’t worry about it, a good ET slip will cure cancer.”

The way I now see it, just because things weren’t working out doesn’t mean we should give up and throw in the towel. At least not just yet… There’s still a lot of potential. We just have some details to work through. If we can do that (and I think we can), I’m almost positive that we will be better then we were before. The Martin, MI race is coming up soon. Maybe we can figure things out there. Hopefully, I’ll see you there…

Until then, We’ve got more work to do…

Ted & Tim Pelech
Pelech Bros. Racing


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