Info on CT's oval.
(temperary position for the info) PAGE UNDER CONSTRUCTION. The following is written by CT.
My daily driver is a California Look '56 Oval. It sits on a '68 IRS pan.
It
was a show car built in Canberra about 10 years ago. Normally I use it as
a
daily driver. One day my friend Greg Ward suggested we put his spare engine
in the car and take it to the drags. We called it an STF project which
stands for Sweep The Floor. The idea here is that you use all your spare
parts and build something.
One weekend (in theory it actually took 2) we fitted a single side plate
L-bug gearbox and a home-made tranny strap as well as some new gearbox
mounts. Then we added a big fitting to the fuel tank and ran some 3/8th
efi
fuel line to an electric pump and the to the motor. Next we installed
Greg's engine. The engine has been sitting around in Gregs garage for about
3 years. I don't know when it was originally built but it was a while ago.
It's basically a Stan Pobjoy steroid-spec engine. That's a 1916 with 44IDF
webers and some 044 heads with 42 x 37.5 valves and one of Stan's special
cams. Everything else is stock. Normally this engine would have a
counterweighted crank. This one for some reason doesn't so it won't last
as
long at 7000rpm.
We took the Oval out to Eastern Creek. I let Greg drive because I figured
if anyone was going to blow up his motor it should be him. I didn't have
time to change the tyres so the car was running on some Ultra Metric (ever
heard of them?) 165/15s. They are so crap I told Greg to try and kill them.
He tried.
On the first run Greg pulled up next to a 5.7 litre statesman with 2 holley
carbs poking out the bonnet. It did a smallish burnout then had to wait
at
the lights while the Ovals smoked it's tyres. Greg put the rears in the
water, selected second gear, took the engine to 6800rpm and dumped the
clutch. He didn't think anything was happening until smoke started to come
into the cabin. It was huge.
The first video (referring to the two videos of CT's car that can be found on my VIDEO'S PAGE), taken from behind the car, Greg is lined up with a
modified 6 cylinder charger that runs 13s. The bug embarasses it in the
burnout and in 1st and 2nd gear. And as you can hear the commentator say
it's pretty close at half track. But unfortunately thanks to having a
standard 3rd gear the revs drop a little in the gearchange and the charger
takes the win.
The second video the bug is racing a black Toyota MR2. Lets just say the
guy will be selling it after the race. This run was a 14.9@ 139kmph.
It was good fun and the oval really hooks up with molten 165s. Nothing beat
it in 1st and 2nd gear all night, not even a turbo liberty 4WD.
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