Olds Achieva day at the Test & Tune

[Robert Swartz]

Got to spend a rare Saturday at the local track. They've started a once a month index race series for the fast bracket cars (not well attended, I might add). In addition for a small price they opened the track up to Test and Tune for anyone interested.

We decided to take advantage of this to both try different driving methods and hot lap the car to see if we could back up runs.

Art Leong, after running the car this day, your statement on the computer controling what you try to do to the car is correct. For us this day, it mainly concerned the transmission. The car has a automatic, 4 speed OD. It has a built in 1-2 eshift. It never got to 3rd, when manually shifted.

We had really good weather, for July, 70's-80's low humidity. We developed a new problem. For the first time we've run the car, it spun the tires. I suspect that being more a consequence of what the track had done for this race. They had moved the water box forward. This car at present cannot do a burnout, we tried. I set the parking brake, it just pushed out of the water and drug the back tires through. Still trying to figure out how you guys with FWD do a burnout? For this car, my suspicion is, we still had some residue on the front tires. Next time out, the car will have a set of 22" tall DR's. They will be 2 or so inches shorter than the current street tires.

ET wise, the car has pretty much settled into a pattern. The fastest time of the day being an 11.48. The majority of the runs being in the 11.50ish range. We were hotlapping the car, noticed that engine temperature would progessively slow the car down. I made a 4 pass stint, noted that each pass, the car would slow a few hundredths each pass. First pass would be an 11.5x, by pass 4 would be 11.6x. As others have stated, temperature definitely affects these smaller engines.

Overall, a productive day in that the car did what I had anticipated it would do. I'm at a crossroads with this car. As it sets, it can be a pretty consistant "slow" bracket car. To be anything more, I will need to get serious about what I do. Meaning first, I need a real weight assessment. I dry weighed the car with about 3/8's a tank of gas at a truck stop. the slip says 2900 lbs. We suspect they rounded the weight off. In the end, I know for the class we're looking to put the car in, it's at a minimum, 200 lbs heavy.

I guess a question to pose. At what point do you begin to question if a car is worth the further investment of money and time.