Ed note: Picking up from last month, Cheston Chiu breaks down the second part of our final Castrol Syntec Top Car story and our upward journey to the Buttonwillow Raceway for the showdown between our Nissan 350Z and our fellow competitors. Whose cuisine reigns supreme? Read on.
After I finished rebuilding the car, I headed off to Riverside to drop off the Z at K&N. I was the first car there, and a bit anxious to see the other competitor cars. I had seen all their bios on the Castrol Syntec Top Car Challenge website and was particularly excited to see Martin and the AMS Evo 8 as well as Ryan Gates with his Time Attack Evo X. I have an Evo X daily driver, so to meet these guys was like comparing the time when I met the Secretary of the Air Force (yeah, so it might not mean a lot to you, but it was pretty cool for me, ok?). To top it off, the bios stated that a 500+ hp Low Rider was going to be in the big show. Wow. Impressive. This was going to be an interesting event.
The next day started pretty early and I started getting butterflies when we pulled into the parking lot but I knew I had to calm the hell down because it would be one full week of craziness. All the contestants were there early, and I got to introduce myself. Everyone's car was magnificently put together. My Z likes cold weather, and being first on the dyno was nice. Strapping the car down to the dyno wasn't so nice. Since I have a rear diffuser, I had to remove it so that the rear tie down straps could be installed. They spun up the car and immediately shut the car down. The operator was complaining about a weird noise coming from the rear, so they rechecked everything and when I asked about what the noise was, it turned out they mistook the tire roar of my R888s as something wrong with the rollers. The car now had been running and warming up and they did a pull. The numbers were ok, but were lower than what we saw during dyno tuning. Then I looked at the front of the car, and none of the fans were on! Doh, they had pulled the car with no airflow going to the intercooler or radiator. I know its not much horsepower difference, but with every progressive dyno pull, the car gets hotter and power gets sucked up. So I made note of it and immediately they put these huge fans to blow air toward the engine bay. All three pulls were relatively close, with pulls 2 and 3 lower than the first one. It wasn't a great start to the day, but it was still OK. After the dynos were completed, all we had left to do was head up to Buttonwillow. By now the temps were in the high 90s and to make matters worse, it was peak traffic time in So Cal. I'll spare you the boring details of the drive, but we arrived at the Buttonwillow and met up with my friend and driver, Billy Johnson and Taylor Brooks, the crew chief for his race team.
The second day of competition would be the Braking and Quarter-Mile challenge. I know my Z can stop, thanks to my sticky Toyo R888 tires, massive four-wheel Stoptech 14" brake kit, and Hawk DTC pads but it was the quarter-mile that I was afraid of. After the braking competition, we went back to the pits to set the car up for the dragstrip, softening the rear so that it can squat and get maximum traction. We had another idea of disconnecting the rear sway bar endlinks to soften the rear up even more. We didn't fully remove the endlinks, just unbolted the nut from the sway bar and took the bolt out of the eye hole. This later turned out to be a bad idea. When we lowered the car back on the ground, we heard a snapping noise, which I thought was just the dust cover on the rear coilovers snapping into place. "Toot toot" goes the failboat on its first departure. In reality it was both endlinks getting caught on the rear suspension bar and snapping.