In this video we break down the breakdowns from 2 Drag & Drive events this summer: Miles of Mayhem and Race Week.
Video Transcript:*
Hi guys. So, everybody wants to know a little bit about drag and drive and what it takes to do it. I'm going to recap, kind of event by event from the summer. I'm going to start with Miles of Mayhem. That was the one in Canada. I drove up to surprise Rich Guido with, and I want to talk about the parts that we broke, what it took to get there, what it took to get home. So let's step over here.
You can see behind me, I've got cars pulled apart right now because of some other carnage. But, on the drive to Canada, we had a small failure. This is what happened. We were driving, and the car started running really, really rough, like sixth gear and fifth gear was super rough. I thought for sure I broke the transmission. But then I remembered my buddy Rich Guido told me that he dropped a cylinder spark plug or something, and that's exactly what he thought happened to him. And what it turns out is when you drop a cylinder on a T-56 Magnum, when you have a 0.5 overdrive or any overdrive, the motor is turning so slow. In my case, on the Fair Lane back here, 80 mph is about 1,800 RPM, so it's so slow that every power pulse is really felt if it's not there on the setup.
So what happened is, I'm going to flip to this. Here is a broke rocker shaft. These are Crow steel rockers. I don't think this is a fault of the part at all, although I don't know. I've never broken one of these. But this broke. Basically, I flipped over real quick to the screen on the Holly that shows EGTs, and sure enough, we had a cold cylinder. So we pulled over on the side of the road, popped the valve cover. This is what we found. We swapped it out. I always carry spares of valve train stuff for drag and drive. This is a spare here. There's another spare there. So basically, I carry half, exactly half of a complete new set of rockers and shafts ready to go. I also carry the trunion bearings and some of the valve lash adjusters.
So that was the first bit of carnage. And then when we got there, we had an idle issue. This has actually been there for a little while where it would, I had one cylinder that would read really cold at idle, but everywhere else looked good. Data logs look good for EGT, for air, air fuel, everything else. And what we found was an injector was not... These are ID200, so they're fairly large, but it just wasn't metering fuel very well at idle. So we swapped that out and it fixed the problem. It was really just more of a nuisance thing than anything. It didn't affect full power or drivability. I mean, once you were off idle, it was fine. Temperature, everything was smooth. So we swapped it out. I'm going to keep this one as a spare because if we had a hard failure on an injector, we could always pop that one in and be good to go.
And then when we were racing, we were on a super solid pass. It did a 1.460-foot, and then it quit, like quit. Like I was like, "What happened?" Got to the end of the track, tried to crank it, and there was no oil pressure. So I grabbed my laptop, I put it in bank-to-bank, which takes care of the cam sync. And let me show you. I'm going to walk over here and show you. Cam sync for a small block Ford, that's this guy right here on the MSD. It drives the oil pump. So that gear on there, sheared, and we can talk about why. It would start in bank-to-bank, but there was no oil pressure. So I shut it off right away, went back to the pits, pulled that, and I'll put a picture of that gear in here because I can't seem to find it right now. But the gear had sheared, and we put in another one, and we were good to go. And we ended up winning the stick shift class. But it was a bit of work. It wasn't terrible, but that's just some of the carnage we experienced.
Now, I do run a composite cam sync gear for a number of reasons, and I carry some spares just in case. I used to run the bronze ones, which are these, but they would wear pretty quickly. As a matter of fact, this is an older one. And if we put these side by side, can you see the difference in the width of the teeth? This one's been used already, and it's worn down those teeth quite a little bit. That's a new one, that's an old one. And here's a composite one. I've just had way better luck with the composite ones. They run them in NASCAR. They're compatible with any camshaft you have in there. So you don't have to worry about lots of conversations on the internet about, "Well, you got to run a steel gear with a billet camshaft," whatever. I don't even know what they are, but the composite, it doesn't matter what it is. It just works really well.
So there was that. And then on the way home, driving back from Canada, we ended up doing 3,800 miles round trip that whole week and winning the stick class, which was super cool. But on the way home, the throttle was doing some weird stuff. Like we would go to pass or accelerate slightly, and we couldn't figure out. I thought it was a tune-up issue. And then finally, I was riding co-pilot, and my co-pilot was driving, and it was doing it for him too. And I was watching the indicator, and we're kind of fixated on the AFRs because they're jumping around and stuff. But then I happened to look over at the TPS, and it would go from like 20 or 30, and then it would go back down to zero and then come back. So that indicated a TPS error. And I had a spare one of those. We swapped this at a gas station. This is a new one. We swapped it at a gas station and did a TPS recal, and it was fixed. Now you're going to ask me what TPS this is. This is the NAPA part number. Let's see here. Where is it? This is the NAPA part number.
But I changed the plug. Oops, I dropped it on the ground. I changed the plug on it because that's what's set up for the Holly. I don't understand why the Holly harness doesn't come with something that's easily found and used in the aftermarket. I really am a big fan of OEM parts for whatever you can do because they're engineered to go 100,000-plus miles. They're usually, I don't want to say cheap, but they're usually less expensive than aftermarket parts, and they work. OEM is not going to tolerate a part that's not going to last. So I just put a weather pack connector on this thing, and it plugs right into the Holly harness, and I've
had no issues. This is probably the first TPS that I have lost. I think that's it.
Let me show you some of the other spares and stuff that I bring on a race-type event. I'm going to put the phone right here because I'm going to put this composite gear back in its little plastic nest because they are... It's not plastic, it's composite, but they are not inexpensive, so I don't want it to get banged up or damaged at all. Put that back in the box here. Okay. Oh, and I forgot one other thing that we broke was a roll pin in the transmission. This thing. This is the shift rod in a T-56 Magnum. And up inside here, there's a roll pin that connects it to the shift rail in the transmission. Well, that roll pin broke, and boy, I thought for sure we had grenaded something in the transmission, and that would have been a bad deal. But it was just a roll pin. Ordinarily, most setups, you've got to pull a transmission to get to this plate to pull that off to get the roll pin and just check it out.
Well, let me show you in my setup. I've got a floor that has a removable section in it. Let me get in here. It has a removable section to make that easy. So it ended up being about a 20-30 minute fix instead of hours to pull a transmission for a single roll pin. You can see here. That's the tunnel. It comes off, and I can get to the top of the transmission here. Makes it super easy if I have to service stuff. So that's kind of super helpful. And that was it. Roll pin, injector, TPS sensor, rocker shaft. I think that was it. So that was Miles of Mayhem, and I can talk more about Race Week, the second Race Week, which we did not finish. You can see the block is behind me, and yeah, the engine's all torn apart, everything's on the shelf back here.
We had a good start. We were in a solid second place. But on the drive from the second track, which would have been... We started in Pueblo, went to Kearney, and on the drive back, we had some issues. This does not look good. And guess what those are? Those are the cam bearings. Yes, it kicked the cam bearing out. And of course, wrecked the camshaft. You can see the bearing surface there, it's super trashed. All the lobes and stuff look good. Here's another cam bearing here that wouldn't come out. It ended up grooving up the front because it drove the cam forward, it was moving, I'm sure back and forth, and I had two lifters that were hard to get out, but only because it gouged up the side. It didn't wreck the wheels or anything. It gouged up the side.
But what we found is when we pulled the valve cover off, I had on the driver's side, I had three pushrods that were not in the cups. And when I say not in the cups, this is the underside of the rocker shaft. This is the cup for the lash adjuster. You can see that one is destroyed. There were three of them like that on the driver's side, and some more on the passenger side. It beat that stuff up pretty good. This one, I think, is the one where the end of the pushrod actually came off. And I was like, okay, we have extra rocker arm assemblies, so we'll swap that out. But I was trying to figure out how you could ever create enough clearance to get it to come off the cup, and the only thing I could think of was that the roller bearings had come out of the lifters. I wasn't thinking at all that a cam bearing would happen because the whole camshaft would move. Then we pulled, and let's keep in mind, this was in the middle of the night, but it was dark. We were kind of running from a thunderstorm. We actually had to sit in the car for about an hour for the thunderstorm to pass. We had a tarp up underneath the hood, kind of like a tent, so we could work on it. It was awesome.
We pulled the other side, and there were four pushrods on that side that had come out of the cups, crashed them. And at that point, I pulled the plug. I was like, something else is majorly wrong here, and I don't have the parts to fix this on the side of the road. So we were out. And when I got it home, actually the next day, I was talking to Tony and Tess, and he said, "Oh yeah, you cracked the block." I'm like, "Come on." And he goes, "Watch this." And he turned to his wife Tess, that's Miss Midnight Maverick Tess, and he said, "Hey, honey, Bill kicked a cam bearing out." And she goes, "Oh, I'm so sorry." Apparently they've done this before on a Dart block.
So I got home, pulled the intake and stuff. We pulled the motor, and that's exactly what it was. So got to do a block swap. Fortunately, it didn't wreck anything else in the motor. But going to be changing a few things. Obviously, got to get a new cam, put a fresh oil pump in it because it's not super smooth, and the bearings were pretty trashed because I think it pumped a lot of garbage through the motor. But that's about it. We'll talk about some more stuff later, but just wanted to recap the two tail-end Dragon Drive events from this year. Alright, over and out.
*This transcript was automatically generated from the video and may contain errors.