[Ellis V Buth]

Jeg's Speedweek was the official debut for the Slobalt. We pulled in the gate late Tuesday night with a bunch of work to do to the car. The brakes were installed, but still needed to be bled. We got that done and then worked on tightening the new header down properly. We left the trailer to have dinner and work on the other cars and came back to a puddle on the floor. After some head scratching, we found that one of the header tubes got into a transmission line and was causing a leak. So out with the header to put a dent in our brand new header on one of the tubes for clearance.

Wednesday morning is qualifying and class elims day. We have to apply the car number and class designation. We also still have to drain the 87 octane street fuel out of the tank and run some C11 through before going up. We ran out of time Tuesday night after we spent 8 hours on the transmission in the Pinto and didn't get to bed until 4AM!

Take the car to the scales and find that the elevator scales were about 100 lbs heavier than these...so we have to add a bunch of weight. Luckily we were prepared for that but it dampens our spirits a bit because the extra weight means our test data wasn't as close as we'd hoped and the index is going to be a challenge. Fuel check before the run goes well and the weather is decent compared to our testing so we get up there early.

The car goes out and runs well, sounds fine on the shifts and we get a 16.566 at 82 MPH. A measly 6 hundredths above the index...dang it! At this point, we've basically done everything to the car that we can for the week so we are stuck just running it as it is. In the confusion that morning, I forgot to put the NHRA and LODRS stickers on the car. We get in trouble for that at the scales but are able to correct the situation easily.

One of the biggest problems we've run into at this point is the OEM Cobalt computer is untouchable. So we cannot tune it at all and we have plenty to gain from a tune. We have a solution at this point, but a bit of foreshadowing here this solution won't arrive until September so we are stuck with a stock tune until then.

This one went a bit longer than I intended, my apologies. Cobalt proof of concept was a success. Car ran a best of 16.566 and close to 83 MPH in the soupy air that is Columbus. Qualified for both events since there ended up being less than 128 cars there and got to run class elims. It was fun for me because I got to stage up against the Cobalt in my Ranger and for the first time in my life I owned both of the vehicles staging up for a run in stock eliminator! 5 years ago, I wasn't sure I'd ever really own 1 stocker myself let alone 2.