The frame is boxed, the rear suspension is brand new, and race day is here. After all that work, the big question was simple: did the upgrades actually work, or did I just spend a bunch of time and money for nothing? The answer is a little of both, but mostly good news.
Here’s a link to my Log Book: https://snowfamilyracing.com/log-book-sign-up/
Need a weather station for the track? I use this one: https://amzn.to/4u2curV
On the first pass, the car left straight and got down the track without drama. It did squat a little more than I wanted on launch, but it still performed well enough to show that the setup is moving in the right direction. The 60-foot time was a 1.779, followed by a 5.270 to the 330 and an 8.19 in the eighth-mile. That’s not a bad baseline, especially with less-than-perfect weather and a little barometer help working against it.
What really mattered was what the car looked like on launch. The nose came up square, which is exactly what you want to see after frame stiffening and rear suspension tuning. That tells me the frame bracing is doing its job and the anti-roll bar is helping keep the car level instead of letting it twist over on launch. For a drag car, that kind of consistency is huge.
The data also showed there’s still more room to improve. I can drop the upper control arm a hole later and likely pick up more anti-squat, which should help the car separate harder instead of squatting. But the bigger lesson came from a mistake in my original instant center math. On a triangulated four-link, you can’t just measure the control arm length and call it good. You have to measure the actual front-to-back mounting point distance. Because I didn’t do that perfectly, my calculations were off, and the car ended up a little more neutral than I wanted.
Then came the bad news: the engine started showing signs of head gasket trouble. The dipstick looked milky, the coolant level dropped, and the car started misfiring under load. So even though the suspension worked, the night ended early because the engine had other plans.
Still, it wasn’t a wasted effort. The frame bracing, anti-roll bar adjustments, and rear suspension upgrades all proved their worth. The car launched straight, stayed composed, and gave me real data to work from. The next step is fixing the head gaskets, recalculating the instant center, and getting back to the track with a better setup than before.
That’s the real win in racing: learning what worked, what didn’t, and making the car better one pass at a time.
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