[JoshMac]

Got round two of the weight reduction done, made a “ram air” headlight and added a set of drag radials before heading back to the track last night. This time I removed the quad shocks, dog bone and the cat back. As you can see from the pics the dynomax mufflers on the car had completely blown out. The glass mat from in the muffler had clogged the tailpipes. I always thought the car sounded a bit odd and muted considering it had weld in mufflers and now I know why.

Headed out to test and tune last night to see what difference it all made. Unfortunately the weather didn’t cooperate so I only got two passes in with the car still hot from the drive down. The car picked up over 2 tenths and 2 mph from my first trip. It went 8.85 and then 8.82 about 2 minutes later, both at 81.8mph. The car had some more in it I think but I didn’t get to cool it down or take my time with the weather coming in. With good weather and some time to play with it on the drag radials I think it would go in the 8.60’s without doing anything else.

I also picked up a Dragy performance meter to try out and was really impressed. The Dragy showed I went an 8.89@81.9 on the first pass which was an 8.85@81.8 on the track timing. It also showed my best 0-60 time was 5.38, which is what I would expect considering all the magazines from ‘03/‘04 had the auto cars at 5.6 on the stock Gatorbacks.

Next step is I’d like to find a SCT SF3 and put a canned tune on the car. I’m still holding out on the off-road x pipe and gears to see just how fast I can go with no real performance mods.