My 22 days before Indy

[Jim D'Amore]

Originally Posted by davidhuff

I will say this about Jim D'Amore,he is honest, no one out works him and he will share a wealth of information on the new mustangs.JMO

Thank you for the kind words David. You know this all started back in Gainesville, the beginning of this year. Two cars with the same combination hit the index a couple of times to be #1. He came up to me and said sorry but I had to do it. I was actually happy for him (a fellow Cobra Jet racer) to become #1. That is when I was told that he was not involved but they are going to tear us down again at Indy this year. That was all the way back in March. I never paid much attention to that statement until a Month before Indy our cylinder head casting #s disappeared from the approved product list. This bothered me because I checked with Ford and Dave Born said he knew nothing about it. I checked with Ford Parts and service, the part#s that disappeared were still available from Ford. So I contacted NHRA and they put 1 casting # back up. This made half of the motor in our car legal and the other illegal. Because there are different casting#s for left and right side. So we changed the heads to a casting # that they said was not going to be deleted. Two weeks after that approved piston #s were deleted. These were the approved pistons since 2013 when the combination was born. So literally 2 days before leaving for Indy they approved a new piston. So i was told by the "Don" that they had all classes covered especially E and D for protesting. I figured if we went to C we would know how much influence the "Don" had on NHRA. I couldn't believe my ears when they told me we had to pull a Rod and Piston after being qualifier #118 out of 160 cars. They said there was discrepancy's on the last 2 tear down cards. They brought Wesley in to make sure the other tech inspectors were right or wrong. We nicknamed the car "legal-cheater" and life goes on...

Jim D'Amore