2008-05-13 12:59:39
Thanks mostly to Barbara Signore, the engine arrived in April, weighing 750 pounds in its crate. The car was in the trailer (moved from my yard to the driveway when the snow melted), and the engine was in the garage; but the engine had to go in the front of the trailer for balance. So we had to push out the Bandit and place the engine up in the trailer. When I say “we,” I mean my two kids, Tai and Maks, and me.
The driveway is on a slope, and there’s not a lot of room to maneuver a 20-foot trailer, so we drove down to the flat parking lot of the high school just down the hill, and rolled the Bandit out, with Maks sitting in the car. That was the easy part. Maks stayed in the car, his head barely peeking over the door, a security guard against high-school boys wanting to play Dale Junior. Tai and I drove home, and loaded the engine into the trailer using a rented pallet jack. I won’t get into how much harder I made it, by being in a hurry and as a result stupid. I tried to make it a lesson for Tai, at least. Haste makes idiocy. It’s how you crash and burn, and sometimes die.
While I was cursing and struggling, Maks got a call on my cellphone. Across the river, at an industrial building I own, a carpenter had broken a water pipe and there was a flood on a carpeted office floor.
Back at the high school with the engine pushed to the front of the trailer, there was one guy left in the parking lot after the track meet that I’d been counting on to provide able-bodied boys to push the Bandit back up in the trailer. Enormous inner relief when the four of us got it in without too much trouble, only three tries of “one-two-three-push!” I drove home and swapped my 454 Chevy tow truck for a road-test Toyota Sequoia timed for the job, and a couple days later drove up to Pat’s Autosport, in Auburn, Washington, about four hours away.
A word here about my truck. I just bought a 1988 Chevy one-ton 4x4 pickup with a 454 cubic-inch engine, T400 transmission, and all the heavy-duty stuff, including a tow package and transmission oil cooler. 155k miles, freshly rebuilt engine and transmission. I got it for $2400 and thought I had scored, until my mechanic who knows such trucks well, basically told me it was a rusty, dirty, piece of junk, needing $2000 worth of work—half of it necessary (brakes, oil cooler lines, idler arms), the other half optional: getting the driver’s door and passenger window to work, and, oh, also the windshield wipers. But isn’t that what they make Rain X for? For people who don’t want to spend $400 or whatever just to have working windshield wipers?
Fitting a new engine and transmission into a racing car for the first time is not an easy thing. There are lots of mounting, plumbing, and component issues. The fittings are unique, and in this case some of the parts go back decades. They’re new parts, but they need to be period correct.
The engine I bought at the IROC going-out-of-business auction turned out to be perfect for the project. Jay and Barbara Signore, co-part-owners of IROC, have been friends for 30 years—I met them at Daytona in 1977, writing about the IROC series for Sports Illustrated. There’s nobody in racing who’s more respected than Jay, for knowing what he’s doing and being straight-up about it—and he knows all the best and most knowledgeable people, if not everybody. For sure, he could write a book, after all those years solving every driver’s complaint—we’re talking legends racing against each other, Unsers, Andrettis, and Earnhardts (7 of them), always trying to get an edge. Jay was responsible for keeping 18 cars performing reliably and equally to the standards of racers like this!
On Friday night, Pat and I were up to our ears in challenges (some might say alligators). At 10 p.m. New Jersey time, Jay called, with all the right information and people to contact. By then we had the engine and transmission mostly mounted, but headers were an unknown, driveshaft tolerance was dubious, and hood clearance wasn’t even close. Jay told me who to call, including Dave Rodder at Brodix Cylinder Heads, where I learned some history about the engine.
Think of it as a 2006 engine built to 1980’s racing technology. It’s your basic 350-cubic-inch GM racing engine, with aluminum 23-degree Pontiac cylinder heads as used in NASCAR racing beginning in about 1979. There was no reason for IROC to keep up with the evolution of racing engines, because it was a spec series: the object of an IROC engine was reliability and equal horsepower, not maximum horsepower. As it was, the relatively light IROC Firebirds were too fast at Daytona, which is why mine uses a small 390 cfm (a measure of flow) carburetor.
When the Bandit was restored from 2000-2003 by Sam White Motorsports in North Carolina, the engine was moved back in the frame, which is one of the reasons it handles better than when I drove it in the IMSA Kelly Series in 1983. Special motor mounts were built, which for us meant abandoning the standard 350 engine mounting points. Also, the IROC engine had mounts for power steering, and … we don’t need no stinkin’ power steering. Back in the day, it took a real man to drive a car like this. Removing the power steering mechanism affected the oil pump clearance, and it all went from there. Twice, I drove 100 miles round trip for parts. Bought a 25-inch oil pump drive belt one trip, took it back the next. Bought a long shift lever the first trip, took it back for a short shifter the next.
But mostly—and I’m proud of having made this contribution to my own damn racing team—I looked for solutions to our challenges by doing a reporter’s research. It’s not a slot that most small-time racing teams have. I used the internet a lot, and called everyone I knew with knowledge about the car, asking questions from a glass-half-empty perspective, in pursuit of building a bulletproof Bandit. Besides Jay Signore, I called Mike Powell, my crew chief from 1983 when he was 19, and who had found me the Tex Racing T101-A transmission, rebuilt by G-Force in North Carolina after use by Evernham Racing, probably by Washington driver Kasey Kahne at Watkins Glen last year (he’s the one they make the funny swooning-ladies commercials about). I also called Sam White, who rebuilt and restored the car; and Udo Horn, who raced it three times and got first twice, including my co-driving with him in the 3-hour HSR race at Sebring in 2004.
The big mystery was why the center crossmember under the engine had been cut and replaced with a diagonal piece, which tilts the engine up on its left side by about ¼-inch. Udo’s 650-horsepower engine had so much torque it tweaked the engine on its mount, so he had fabricated and added steel mounting plates. That center crossmember badly needed beefing up, so Pat welded in some neat plates—but it’s still not mounted on the level. We’ve only got about 480 horsepower, and the engine is now more securely mounted than before, so I think we’ll be okay.
Jay had me call Dave Rotter at Brodix Heads, who was glad to help with information about the heads and intake manifold. On the next call I found a legend, Jere Stahl of Stahl Headers, and only realized after I spoke to him that I was there when he burst into hot-rod fame as the secret behind the success of Grumpy Jenkins, at the York, Pennsylvania NHRA drag races in the ‘60s. In 1964 I drove there all night from Altoona, sleeping upright in the back seat with two other guys, and vividly remember seeing Grumpy Jenkins run in his ’63 Chevy. So now Jere Stahl is 72 and taking up SCCA sports car racing. “You think I need a psychiatrist?” he asked on the phone. “Definitely not!” I said, thinking of myself as much as him, because if I’m racing at 72 I sure won’t think I’m nuts.
The phone call was memorable. I was running south from Tacoma to Portland along I-5, in the fast lane in a big SUV, doing all the things you're not supposed to do: especially not a professional automotive journalist like me. Holding the cellphone to my ear with my left hand (on hold), drinking a Triple Grande Triple Equal Starbucks Latte with my right hand (fresh from a $75 gas stop), steering with my left knee when I sipped. Feel free to yell at me for being an idiot. Life sometimes demands triple-tasking.
Mr. Stahl really had no idea who I was, other than what I had said after telling him my name: Jay Signore suggested I call. Stahl had made all the headers for the IROC engines, but only in batches on order. But after searching the Stahl inventory, and with the help of Judy and Shane later on, they found one set of headers made for those old Pontiac heads and a front-steer stock car chassis. They’re on their way to Pat’s Autosport as I write this, and I pray they’ll fit. Or, I should say: like Luckey Fluckey, I know they’ll fit, and if they don’t, I’ll make them fit.
I think-I hope I solved the hood clearance challenge, by removing the one-inch spacer under the carburetor, and learning the history of the Brodix HV1005 intake manifold, which had long runners that Dave Rodder told me could be shortened by ¾ inch, so Pat is having it machined. Mike Powell told me the type of air cleaner they used for hood clearance in the NASCAR Busch Series, and I ordered it from BSR in North Carolina.
Udo led me to Muscle Motorsports in North Carolina, link, a business started by another old Pennsylvania racer, Bob Gribble. He wheels and deals in used and surplus NASCAR team parts, and put together a 5-gallon oil tank that came from Richard Childress Racing and matches what IROC used. It too is on its way, as I write this.
The shifter on the T101A transmission (last used by Kasey Kahne at Watkins Glen) was about 8 inches farther back, we had to cut a bigger hole in the floor, which turned out all good, thanks to Pat’s neat sheetmetal fabrication and smooth touch with a welder. He got rid of a dangerous angle on the floorboard that could easily break the driver’s right ankle in a crash—that’s how it was when I raced it in ’83, but back then I never looked at those things. My right hand is now closer to the gear lever, which can be shorter and lower, not one of those big honkin’ truck-like shifters. I’ve got a really nice chrome Jaguar shift knob, shaped the way I like a shifter to feel in my palm.
The instrument panel was gone when I got the car, so I ran out to the high-performance corner of an auto parts store and bought the gauges, including a small tachometer using a cigar-shaped dash-mounted shift light. Shift lights weren’t used back then, but this is about preserving the engine, so “period correct” goes out the window. Pat is fabricating a new panel for the oil temp, oil pressure, water temp and volts, after I sat in the car and decided on the locations based on visibility and priority.
While he was down there cutting and welding metal, he made me a dead pedal. We changed the seat mounting, and I ordered new Simpson five-point latch-lock belts.
Pat has a list of about six things to do the car this week, including fitting a new oil tank and headers. Watch for the next report, after I go up again on May 21-23. Then it’s off the American Merchant Marine Veterans annual convention, in Portland, where I’m looking forward to meeting and talking to more of these very great 80-something salts and WW2 vets, as I peddle my book “At All Costs.”
end.
Sam Moses
Previous Blogs:
Scored an Engine!
2008-03-10 06:31:05
On Saturday morning March 8, I was in a hotel room in Laguna Beach with the ocean crashing just outside my third-floor balcony. I could see the horizon through the wide-open sliding-glass door, but my eyes were glued to my laptop screen. I was...
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The Latest Bandit Story
2008-02-16 18:22:52
This piece will appear in the April issue of BMW Roundel magazine, a sidebar to my story about driving a BMW M Coupe to sixth overall with Doug Mill and car owner Mike Helton, in the Four Hours of Pacific Raceways.
At 5:45 in...
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In Search of One Good Motor
2008-02-16 17:36:59
In the final chapter of “Fast Guys, Rich Guys, and Idiots,” the Bandit blows two engines in one day at Daytona. One of them was a 550-horsepower motor that came out of the shop of the legendary Junior Johnson, Tom Wolfe’s...
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