Spencerforhire Vega race report.

[spencerforhire]

In the last month and a half there's been a lot of ups and downs; serious lack of traction on a "green" track at the first race in Cape Breton resulted in repeated trips to the rev limiter(I normally see 6700 at the stripe but the telltale was on 7500) which hurt a couple of valvesprings and caused the car to gradually slow down almost a full second and lose 15 mph. Was still a good weekend because I won on Saturday and went a few rounds on Sunday even with car slowing every run.
New springs didn't show up in time for the next race in Greenfield two weeks later, so I shimmed the ones I had back up to spec and went anyway. The car was still "off" and felt like it had a bit of a miss, but the springs checked out ok, the plugs looked fine and the infra-red thermometer showed all the cylinders were firing. Decided to check the timing, and couldn't see any marks; borrowed another timing light and still nothing, but when I revved it up, the timing marks would appear and disappear. Then I shut off the switch and watched the balancer make a couple of revolutions AFTER the engine stopped. Turns out the outer ring of the balancer was spinning free and was only held on by 3 of the 6 bolts holding it together. This was a Professional Products SFI approved race damper, but the elastomer holding the hub and inertia ring together had failed after less than a year(75 passes). I can just imagine the resulting carnage if it had come apart at high RPM; best case scenario would have wiped out the water pump, alternator and radiator, but it could have been even worse. I've heard of exploding balancers breaking the end off crankshafts and even taking out a front tire. Not cool.
I wasn't interested in trying to fix it at the track so I came home early as it was nearly 100f with 87% humidity.
Bought and installed a new Fluidamper(big $$$$ but they don't come apart) as well as the new valvesprings before the race last weekend in Cape Breton and all is back to normal; the Vega works great running in the 9.70's. I went a few rounds both Saturday and Sunday, set a couple of personal bests(1/8 MPH is up about 1.5) and had 7 reaction times better than .518 out of the 14 passes I made. Even had a .501 light on a losing round against a mid 7-second dragster; I'm right at the finish line thinking I've got the race won and he went by me at 175+ mph to take it with a MOV of .034. He had a .508 light and had simply run closer to his dial than I had.
I've got a month off before the next race so now I can get caught up on all the other things in my life that get put aside so as I can go racing.

[Monza Harry]

Well Spencer that sounds just "Balmy" just another day here in the sun belt (we had a week with lows of 80ish* high's of 93/95 same humidity 80/90 glad that has passed!). I am glad you caught that balancer and happier that you posted this info here, as that was the one I had picked out for my car! That has to suck, I know that those aren't the most expensive but still a long way from the cheapest! And glad that it didn't come apart as that would be really messy and destroy the Race Budget even worse. 8" balancer @ 6500 r/min = 155 Miles per hour! Harry

[spencerforhire]

I was talking to a friend/fellow racer/customer who had another Professional Products damper come apart last year; it took out the crank and block of a big $$$ 700hp 408 Small Block Ford stroker. Very scary; these things weren't cheap ones, they both were the "Poweforce Plus" series race dampers. I guess "SFI 18.1 approved" isn't a guarantee of quality.....
There's good and bad revues of all different types of dampers all over the internet; I did a bunch of research before buying the Fluidampr.