[Ellis V Buth]

After a long winter that saw multiple other projects taking longer than expected, the Slobalt sat outside and got no attention until early April.

Despite sitting all winter, she started right up! Andrew pulled her into the shop to remove the balance shafts from the engine and get the car ready for the season. While performing this task, he found a major issue where the tensioner for the timing chain had a bolt broken off and allowing some slop in the timing chain. Quick fix, but could have certainly led to major disaster!

The removal of the balance shafts and related components resulted in a little over 5lbs of rotating weight removed from the equation. In addition to that, we put an electric water pump on as well. We also installed gauges in the car so we can actually tell what RPM, temperature, and oil pressure we are running at! We also made the switch from C11 to Sunoco Purple.

Tested it out at a bracket race at Indy a couple weeks ago...and we finally saw the 15.90's pop up on the board! The air wasn't bad...but not great either. And we had a pesky wind that couldn't make up its mind which way it wanted to blow. The air was somewhere between .07 and .10 slower than the air we had in St. Louis last fall, so take our 15.99 compared to that 16.02 from last fall and the changes seem to have picked us up another 1/10 of a second!

Driver/builder Andrew was also able to pick up his first round win with this car in eliminations that day which felt like throwing the proverbial monkey off his back for sure.

If weather cooperates, we will have the car out testing/racing again this weekend at Indy to see if we can find some more performance.