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This Week at the Starting Line... April 1, 2012


Internet Purchases from the Twilight Zone

Well, I’m sure that in this day and age of push button internet transactions, a few of us have been surprised, at one time or another, when the just like new, mint condition, very fresh whatever it was that we purchased on-line arrived looking a little more tired than it did in the pictures. Now you might think this is the story of the divorced woman in England selling her husband’s motor home in the Yukon Territories for $16,000 in Quebec and for $49,000 in Saskatchewan, but it’s not. No, that’s another story for another time, but this story has its own unique charm as well.

So, there I was scrolling through the pages of racingjunk.com, where I now buy all of my cars, clothing, groceries and personal items, when I stumbled across a beautiful Brand New BBC 540 race engine for sale. Wow, a Brand New 540. Just what I always wanted. I could hear the music, and did it ever look nice in that blurry black and white low res picture! 

After chatting with the owner, a very nice hillbilly from the foothills of some God forsaken place where I will never vacation, I had completed my detailed build sheet of this Brand New 540 from the Pro 1 Heads right down to the Eagle crank and rods. Now, as knowledgable as this nice hillbilly might have been about all things mechanical, I thought it would be a good idea to call the manufacturer of the engine and verify his story, since one can’t be too careful and the hillbilly claimed they knew him well.

Shortly thereafter, I was on the phone with the experts. What an absolutely fantastic idea that was. My side of the conversation was, of course, question after question. The manufacturer’s side of the conversation, as I recall, went something like: oh hillbilly? yup, great guy, know him well, yup, exactly, oh ya, for sure, yup, right on, ya ya, of course, yup, anytime, thanks for calling, goodbye. What’s not to believe, right?   SOLD!

The following week, while I was caressing my new race engine in a manner that any gearhead would understand, but was still cause for my wife to spend the rest of the weekend at her mother’s, I noticed something slightly odd under the valve cover. A very familiar looking Reher Morrison stud girdle, just like the one on my current RM engine. Now, had I actually purchased a new Reher Morrison engine, this might not have been cause for concern. After scratching out a bald spot in my head over a few drinks, I decided to eliminate any possibility of error on my part and double check that my Reher Morrison engine was actually still in my race car where I left it... and there it was. Hmmm, that wasn’t the problem?
 

In time, I managed to figure out that the Dart Pro 1 heads were actually... not Dart Pro 1 heads, and that someone had stolen the Eagle crank and rods and replaced them with a Lunati Pro crank and GRP aluminum rods. Call it a sixth sense, but at this point I knew I was on to something. Further inspection uncovered the fact that somewhere during transit, this 4.25” stroke 540 had actually been reduced to a 4.0” stroke 534 cubic inch engine. Now, we’ve all likely seen five hundred and forty dollars turn into five hundred and fewer dollars when it crossed the border, but I wasn’t aware, until now, that a similar exchange rate applies to race engines. 

During a subsequent phone call with a now very angry hillbilly, I was informed that I hadn’t paid enough money for all the trick parts that he didn’t know were in the 540 engine that he didn’t realize was actually a... well, you get the idea. Somehow, the angry hillbilly had since learned that he had paid a little more for this Mystery Motor than he was capable of remembering. While I can’t say for sure that the hillbilly’s memory lapses are the result of natural gas leaking into the water table (I saw a documentary on this once on the Discovery Channel. It wasn’t pretty), I can tell you that the Sniper ll intake manifold was delivered exactly as it was described. It said Sniper ll on it.

At this point, putting the Mystery Motor straight into the car was no longer an option. Sending it to ERD in St. Catharines, for what I was hoping wouldn’t turn out to be an autopsy report, was. The question that needed to be answered now was a simple one: bullet or bomb? After a complete physical that included at least one finger probing an exhaust port, the Mystery Motor somehow managed to produce a solid 900HP on the dyno, and without any connecting rods exiting to the left. With a clean bill of health the new bullet can now be moved to its final destination.
 

All’s well that ends well, I suppose, but I’m still having some difficulty deciding what the real moral of the story is. I’m thinking it’s either: never phone a redneck for a reference on a hillbilly, or perhaps, never purchase something with a computer from someone who can’t use a calculator.

This Week at the Starting Line... Feb 17, 2012


Where's Wally? 

Neale Armstrong, Track Director at Cayuga's Toronto Motorsports Park and Andrew Stirk of DSE Automotive have put together a great looking program for the 2012 season. Andrew is hosting the DSE Automotive Sportsman Racing Series and with Neale's assistance has added NHRA sanctioned races to the schedule. Local racing will now include a National Dragster Challenge and a Summit Racing King of the Track race. Wally trophies will be up for grabs at both races and participants will also have an opportunity to advance to NHRA Divisional events through the points series.

Add in a couple of the Big Buck Bracket Races posted on the TMP website and Drag Racing in Southern Ontario is starting to take on a whole new look for 2012.