So over the past couple weeks we have been working on getting the motor ready.

Our newest Condor team member, Ben Phelps, has been spending some time porting and polishing  our race head.

He's just started taking material in this pic, but the final head will have the intake ports matched to the gasket and our previously ported intake manifold.

In the meantime Jay and I were working on sealing up the 2.7 liter bottom end.

Jay finishes installing the rear brake calipers.

Ben was at it for a few days making sure all the ports were even

Looking pretty good

The bottom end is finished and ready for the head.

In order to stay within the budget there was no way we could afford to pay a machine shop to resurface our head, so we did it ourselves.

All it took was sandpaper, adhesive spray mount, a granite slab and lots of elbow grease. It was a lot more work than expected, but between 3 of us we got it done.

John takes his turn.

A quick video of Ben going at it.

The final product... looking good, now all we need to do is assemble it.

stay tuned for more at www.dirte30.blogspot.com

Freaking Awesome!

Our car is on the cover of the April issue of Grassroots Motorsports Magazine!

Jimmy had been trying to convince me to do the Warsteiner theme for over a year before the 2010 event! I finally agreed, and I'm glad we did it! This project has been a blast, 4 years in the making, with the final goal of not only being in the magazine being on the COVER!!! Thanks to all the guys at GRM! It has been great working with my Jimmy, we have met so many cool people in the process. Thanks to all the locals who come out and help! Jay, Bartley, John, Jason, Ben, Brian! You guys have all been a part of this project in your own way! Thank you, most importantly to my beautiful wife Christina, who has always supported me in everything I do. I love you baby.

Jason and I were back at the shop this last Wednesday finishing up the rear brake caliper rebuild.

Just like the fronts, he pulled the rubber boots off, slid the pistons out, soaked and cleaned everything, then put it all back together again. It went by quickly and without any major issues.

In the mean time I took the intake manifold off the head

... and grabbed the oilpan from the parts block. The other pan was somehow cracked on the bottom. :0 THe new pan needed an oil return for the Holset hx35 to drain into.
I soaked the pan in some degreaser at John's shop.

I then pulled all the Home Depot fittings from the old pan, cleaned them and re installed them on the new pan.

After a while we needed something else to keep us busy, so we grabbed some spray cans and and John donated his shirt.... super-m20-man was born! You can have your own super-m20-man, all you need are some old hi-temp spray cans and a blown headgasket.

Teardown

We were back at the shop last Wednesday tearing into our spare m20 from the parts car.

While Jay took care of the teardown, Jason was busy pulling our front brake calipers for a simple rebuild.

Once the brake calipers were out, we pulled the old rubber seals out, they were in pretty bad shape on the driver's side. fortunately the calipers and pistons looked pretty good. Bartley soaked/cleaned up the pistons and calipers, and then we put everything back together.

Once we had finished tearing down the parts motor, we moved on to the original motor that had been in the car. We knew we had blown the head gasket, but we were curious as to what else was going on.

Well,  when we pulled off the valve cover we realized where the strange noises might have been coming from…

 
At some point on race weekend, we broke one of the rocker arms.

I really wonder when this happened. My guess is that it might have been on our last drag run, but what are the chances of this happening at the same time as blowing the headgasket?

Talk about a blown head gasket! 21psi FTW!

As we inspect things a bit closer, we also found that one of our valves had kissed the piston....

Looks like either some detonation occurred, or something got sucked into the motor.

All I know is that the m20 is a strong motor, for it to have this many things going on with it. I'm certain they didn't all happen at once. Its amazing that the motor was still strong enough to give us the 2nd fastest autox time, and a 12.3 1/4 mile run.

This Wednesday, we finishing rebuilding the rear calipers and start putting things back together.

2011 work begins on the race car.

The past 3 months have flown by. We have all been super busy, Jimmy was busy preparing for his big move to Chile. I bought a house back in Aug, and with all the house remodeling going on, the car has been sitting, collecting dust since the event.  Now is the time to get the car prepared for the 2011 Ultimate Track Car Challenge. Jay and I got together this past Wednesday.
I started by putting the car on jack-stands, and pulling the drive-shaft.

The driveshaft center support bushing and guibo both look good. I just need to get some new bolts,
I'm creating a list of all the parts we will need to swap or rebuild in order for the car to be safe.

Jay pull the Holset HX35 from the Manifold while I pulled the wiring harness.

We drained all the fluids, pulled the radiator and all the intercooler piping, turbo and all wiring.

The motor ready to come out.

Since we didn't have a load leveler, we had to get under the car and pull the transmission off before pulling the motor, otherwise we wouldn't be able to angle it enough to clear the firewall and radiator support.

Between the two of us we were easily able to pull it out.

Clean engine bay!

This week we pull the motor apart to check the headgasket.

Its about that time...
Time for another update. For those of you that have not seen these videos yet. They are both Challenge videos from the Autox. The first vid is of our first 4 timed runs. The second vid is 2 fun runs, in which we were trying to beat our best time.
Enjoy.

12.3 second drag run at the GRM challenge

This is our first of many videos that I will be uploading. This was our second run of the day. I ran a 12.9 on the first run, The car ran better than expected, and it really hooked up well in first and second gears, compared to last year(thanks John for the drag setup pointers), I hot lapped it and went straight to the line for run #2. Little did I know that we were going to loose the hood on this run ;) We ended up running our best time at the event, a 12.3 sec drag run at 117 mph. The car has an HX35 running 21lbs of boost with a Stock m20 motor. Tuning was done with the stock motronic and a 535 AFM. We blew the Head-gasket on the next run(3rd and final)! Have you ever seen a bunch of people celebrating the ripping off of a hood? Get ready to... (In reality we were happy about our time,...no really we were ;)