HOT ROD Drag Week 2017, powered by Dodge and presented by Gear Vendors Overdrive
When people think about Drag Week, their first assumption is that the battle throws down on the track. And competitively, that’s mostly true — but to make those ETs count, you’ll need to make it across a thousand miles. What typically makes something fast rarely makes it more reliable than your factory-fresh daily-driver, and that’s the challenge builders and drivers have to balance in order to make it to Friday. On Monday, we rode along with 2016 Spirit of Drag Week winner Jeff Oppenheim and his 1986 Chevrolet El Camino, along with son-and-father team James and Ken Rowlett in their 1985 Fox Mustang, Al Nemetz with his blown 2014 Ford Mustang GT, Vic Nye his 2000 Pontiac Firehawk, and Wesley Frazier in his 2016 Ford EcoStang (Mustang Ecoboost). Jeff managed to convince this Pennsylvania-based crew to join Drag Week’s mechanical mayhem even after his El Camino earned the title of “Crispy Camino,” so you know they’re the right kind of crazy.
The Rowletts’ week started off a little rough — their freshly-built, 6.0 LS-truck-based Fox hadn’t ran until Sunday’s tech day (with Jeff’s El Camino rope-towing the Fox threw the lanes as James and Ken worked through the bugs), but for Monday’s leg, they had diagnosed their misfire as a broken valve before even leaving the track after the first day of racing. For many racers, that’s when the French national flag is flown while giving in to the God of Speed, but for Drag Weekers, there’s an insatiable force of “Never give up, never surrender!”
So, on the road we went! With the short jaunt from the Gateway Motorsports park to an E85-ready gas station, the Rowletts quickly realized that their seven-cylinder LS was creating nasty driveline harmonics at cruising speeds (55-60mph), but a donated hose clamp was slapped on the driveshaft to help balance things out (the worm screw housing acting as a balancing weight, classic road-side trick). Despite the painstakingly-slow pumps, we were on the road in no time through the hills and cornfields of Illinois.
Our first checkpoint was the Blue Moon Drive-In in Galesburg, IL, a monolithic icon of the small town that went into operation in 1949 and through into the 1980s. In 2005, it was reopened by the Carlsons, who graciously hosted racer-after-racer as we came though. Drag Week runs racers down a required route, our torture test to find that ultimate street car, and we use checkpoints to keep racers honest while bringing them along some of America’s best road-side nonsense. We got our photos, grabbed a quick tour of the projector room, and quickly got back on the route.
Speaking of torture tests, ours had already begun. James’ Fox began letting the smoke out, and we pulled quickly pulled over. If you’ve been following Drag Week, you know how familiar these scenes are: hood up, heads together, with fields and farms in the back-drop. James and Ken began looking over the LS, quickly tracing the oil leak to the sending unit, which had begun to work its way loose. As each of our fellow racers passed, a thumbs-up/down system became the norm as competitors slowed to check on each other. Jeff threw them a few quarts of oil while the sending unit was screwed tight, and we were back on the road in ten minutes.
For the most part, the trip had been pretty smooth. Weather was good, and Jeff and I were talking about the madness of the week and about how he’d felt returning to Drag Week after his roadside fire in 2016. Readers will remember that last year, Jeff’s Elco suffered an oil fire when the oil pressure guage feed line broke, pouring hot oil over even-hotter hot-side turbo plumbing. With the help of his friends, including the Rowletts who delivered a Holley ECU and wiring harness from Tennessee overnight to Indy, he was able to rebuild the El Camino in 12 hours to return on the road, grabbing the checkpoint he missed, and ride the last night out with an exhibition pass (the tow to Indy disqualified him) to seal the week off on a high note, even if there was no timed result that mattered any more.
Though the two-lane concrete ribbons of road that make up the country highways of Illinois, it’s hard not to feel like the Driver and Mechanic of Two Lane Blacktop, the iconic barn-burner movie about a duo that’ll take a race at any cost as they cross the US — sounding a little familiar?
For the most part, things were going along fine. Jeff’s Elco had developed a minor surge under certain loads, but the Holley EFI began to tweak and play behind the scenes as the ride went on, smoothing things out over the miles. Just about the only thing that broke up the miles of cornfields were the occasional cow-paddy scents, but there’s something about the heartland at sunset that just feels right as you bomb along in a straight-piped, turbocharged El Camino with a host of speed freaks in tow.
We had just made it to Jerseyville, IL, about 40 miles from the hotel, when Ken sent a text that’ll stop any circus: “We broke down. Calling tow truck.” Of course, after the 14-hour day, everyone’s cellphone batteries had depleted, and after 10 minutes of discussion and phone charging, we were able roughly locate them about two-miles back. Upon arrival, things didn’t looks good. The bent valve, which we later learned had been damaged by a previous shortblock failure, had broken. Jame caught it quick, but there’s few failures that are more potentially-catastrophic than dropping hardened-steel parts into the cylinder. While father Ken had already called a tow truck, James was determined to pull the head an find out whether or not the head of the valve had bounced around like a gnat on meth inside the motor. If the damage was relatively minor, they had a fresh pair of heads staged waiting for delivery in St. Louis.
James, Ken, and Jeff quickly broke out the needed combination of sockets, ratchets, extensions, and impact-drivers to pull the intake and exhaust manifolds off in order to free the suspect cylinder-head from the depths of the Fox’s engine bay. Pulling the rocker on cylinder-five was all we really needed to know, but there’s no stopping a Drag Weeker that’s determined to keep on. Somehow, the fine folks living in the historical Col. William H. Fulkerson Farmstead didn’t mind us autopsying the Fox in their front yard, so the crew pressed on.
After about 45 minutes of controlled thrashing, the head was off, and things were clear: the Rowletts were done — the valve had become one with the piston, but not before beating a hole through the crown. The cylinder head looked like it had been hit with birdshot as the valve rattled around in the combustion chamber just long enough to ruin the head for the foreseeable future.
Disappointment was met with the venerable crrrack-pawp of an icy beverage as James accepted the fate of the incoming tow truck. What’s not important is the failure itself, but the determination to dig until there’s nothing left to find in the quest to hold Friday’s final time-slip.
Not soon after pulling the head, Bowers Towing arrived with a flatbed to grab the Fox and its trailer, and the Rowletts worked with owner Todd Bowers to store the appropriately-named “Boost of Burden” in his shop until they could return with a tow-rig. A racer himself, Todd was more than fascinated with the drama that had played out over the last few hours.
With that, even though the Rowletts’ race was over, they hopped in with the rest of the convoy and decided to spectate the race for the week. James was disappointed, but not mad — Drag Weekers have to have a certain respect for their luck, good and bad, and take the lessons learned from this year to carry on for the next. They’ll be back, they say, and with their rookie year’s hard-knock lessons learned, we hope the Boost of Burden eases up in 2018.
#DRAGWEEK #DRAGWEEK2017
Information and Coverage ( http://www.hotrod.com/events/drag-week/)
Live stream ( https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGvTvFzdMg_Og3fRTwgjOLiRTkmpO0VNg)
The post Tales From the Road: Drag Week’s Real Challenge is the Between the Races appeared first on Hot Rod Network.