We lined up the car for the dragstrip, and went in order of how the cars showed up to the grid. Since we took a little bit more time than the other contestants, we were last in line. The running order was taking longer than normal, and the car was literally baking in the now 106+ degree heat. I tried to spray down the intercooler with water I had brought in a pressure sprayer but it wasn't doing much good. Billy took the Z and started to warm up the tires. We checked tire pressure and ready to go. Our first and second pass was fantastic. I've never seen my car put down quarter-mile times like that. I was pretty stoked. I thought about calling off the third pass because the first two were identical times, but maybe Billy could pull off a miracle and get a better time. The third pass was indeed faster, by only one tenth of a second, but at the end of the run, we all saw a puff of white smoke from the rear of the car. We saw Billy turn to follow the track, so I had thought it was him drifting the corner or a little bit of brake lock/tire scrub since by then he'd be into the triple-digit speeds. Little did I know it wasn't either case, although I wish it would have been, God would I wish it would have been.
When we got back to the pit area, Billy was reporting that the car was extremely hot, water temps and oil temps were very high (220 degrees and 260 degrees, respectively) and worse: after every shift a puff of white smoke would be coming out the tailpipe. Howard thought perhaps one of the piston rings had seized and was now stuck so that oil was blowing by. My brand-new engine, with less than 300 miles, was pwn3d. Billy said he didn't hear any pinging noises under WOT and it felt good up until that point.Obviously, I was glad it wasn't a catastrophic failure with a piston exploding out of the block in glorious fashion, but I felt devastated every time I saw the smoke. But what can you do? No time to fix it, we had to go on and finish. The car still was making decent power but we had to deal with the cooling issue for the next day's time attack.
On the way back to the hotel from the track, I was thinking of how to get the car run cooler. I already had a Power Enterprise radiator, a massive Setrab Oil cooler and a vented hood, but it still wasn't enough in this heat. My C-West long nose bumper has a small opening for air flow and I thought to try to direct air toward the oil cooler since those temperatures were rising faster than water. The nearest Home Depot was over 30 miles away, and by the time I would get there it would be closed. So I did what any other typical engineer would do in a situation like this: become MacGyver. Taylor and I walked around the hotel trying to find anything I could use for ducting, and my first stop was the laundry room. There was an "OUT OF ORDER" sign on one of the dryers and I pulled it aside. I was looking for the hose attachment to the wall. BINGO, still there. I 'borrowed' the 4" diameter x 2 feet flexible hose and all the miscellaneous aluminum fairings there and went to the hotel room. I'd make the duct first thing tomorrow morning after we got to the track, since by now it was dark and we didn't bring enough flashlights.