We ran our 63 valiant at the lemons race at Thunderhill in Northern CA over the weekend. This was our 8th race overall, and first outing with the rebuilt 8.75" rear in place of the 7.25" and the cop car 11.75" brakes up front. Overall day 1 was a mess, but day 2 we went green flag to checkers without doing anything other than pitting for fuel.
On day 1 we had a green bearing on the 8.75" rear fail after 12 laps, fortunately the caliper held the disk rotor on so the axle stayed mostly in.. We did have a new driver who went off roading with it on lap 4, but I don't know if that played into the bearing failure or not. There wasn't anywhere local that had bearings so we had a bonzai run to summit racing in Reno, NV to get bearings and seals and then to a friends machine shop in the bay area to press them on and then back to Thunderhill after 8 hours of driving.. We dropped the axles off with the car at Midnight and other teammates got up early had it all installed and buttoned up half an hour before the call to grid.
On day 2, the car ran well with the only issue being tranny temp getting hot causing us to back off the gas to keep it cool but it was still fun. The car corners and brakes very well now and is competitive in the corners with most other cars but then we watch them disappear on the straights.
In the end we got the heroic fix award which was fun and the car ran great other than the hot tranny. More projects/improvements to do for the next race.
I'll add some pics later.
-Jon
