Jeff G 78

I have pulled dozens and dozens and I have found it to be way easier as a unit. I pulled the front U-joint from an old driveshaft to leave just the yoke and I use that to plug the trans to keep the oil in. I can have a carbed engine out in less than an hour and a FI engine out in 1.5 hours. It takes about the same amount of time to reinstall each of them. The key is to get an engine hoist with a long arm. The hook on the hoist arm must reach the breather port on the valve cover. If not, the engine will be very tough to line up on the motor mounts. I use two pairs of ratchet straps to lift the engine. By using two on each lifting eye, I can keep loosening the rear straps an inch at a time to angle the engine up and out. Just make sure the factory lifting eyes are still there and if they are not, make some from shop scraps. It is 1000x easier with the eyes in place.

My '78 never came out from under the cover this summer. I spent the year working on and racing the 260. Yesterday, I winterized the race car so the Z season is over for me as well. I'ts always sad to put the toys away and wait for 6 months to play again.

I will look into the Garolite Pete. It looks like the right stuff. Today, I washed the race grime off the Z, filled the tank with gas and Sta-Bil, and swapped the water for coolant in the radiator. I didn't diagnose the problem, but it sounds like I blew the manifold-to-downpipe gasket out. There is a new exhaust leak under the hood. Hopefully it's just a gasket and not a cracked manifold. I also checked the engine oil and it is not only still at the full mark, but it's barely dirty. Not bad for 1450 miles at WOT! I use nothing but Valvoline VR-1 40wt. As I ran the car to circulate the Sta-Bil and coolant, I realized that the car never warmed up. I have a feeling that the fail-safe thermostat might have failed. After 20 minutes in the driveway, the gauge barely made it to 120F. During the race, it was running around 130F according to the gauge.

Steve, The racing season is over for 2011, but the 2012 schedule should be out within a week or two. I'll send you the link when it comes out. If you are serious about getting into CCWS, I strongly suggest taking it slow and either joining an established team as either a crew member or rental driver for your first race or two. There are lots of established teams in Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, and Michigan. You are more than welcome to crew with us to get a taste of CCWS racing. As of right now, I don't think we need any drivers, but that can always change. CCWS IS great racing! The series (as well as LeMons) is growing very rapidly since many people are tired of SCCA and how serious everybody takes it. CCWS is a blast and it's FUN! They go to some of the best tracks in the country (as well as Mexico). This year, they were at VIR, Infineon, Sebring, Road America, Laguna Seca, Charlotte, Iowa, Texas World Speedway and other great tracks. They ran around 40 races in 2011. Now the bad news... Even cheap racing isn't cheap, but it's a heck of a lot of fun and cheaper than most other forms of racing. I run a 5 driver team and we each spend about $800 - $1000 per race. If we weren't chasing issues and spending lots of money last-minute, that cost would drop slightly. Entry fees, tires, brakes, racecar fuel and tow rig fuel will set you back about $600 per race and the car will cost about $3000 to $5000 to buy and build including the cage, race seat, a HANS device and other safety equipment. Finally, each driver will need personal safety gear which can be had for as low as $350 and go way up from there. This is why it's a great idea to rent a seat the first time out. For about $600 you can usually find a seat and all you need is your personal safety gear. If you (or any other Classic Z Car Club members) want more info, feel free to contact me. BTW, my wife comes to my races and LOVES it. She has been BEGGING me to let her race with us. So far, I have kept her out of the car just because I can barely afford one share, let alone two shares. I'll get her in the car at a track day next year and we'll go from there.

With our Friday issues, we never mounted the video camera in the car, but one of the other racers says that he will soon be posting a montage of night racing clips with our car. To get a feel for what CCWS is all about, check out this video of a Ford LTD 5.0L and a Dodge Neon. They had a great battle.

I'm happy and sad for you Arne. Best of luck with your search.

http://plastics.dupont.com/plastics/pdflit/americas/delrin/230323c.pdf I'm no materials expert, but it looks like it might work. The only obstacle might be the melting point of Delrin.

The ONLY reason to keep the OE rail is because of the return system. The rail has a nice loop that would have to be replicated. We have run it both with and without the return and so far, it doesn't seem to really care one way or the other. I agree that with no return, we could reroute the supply hose and keep it completely away from the engine. As for the heat transfer through the mounts, I wouldn't have thought so either until I saw the exhaust manifold glowing red. That means the head is pretty damn hot as well so some of that heat will certainly transfer to the rail. Every little bit contributes. I will go through the McMaster Carr catalog and see what kind of insulators I can find. I'm thinking ceramic or fiber-plastic like the mechanical fuel pump uses.

Those look great! What tire size did you go with?

Bonzi Lon, all gas in this region has 10% ethanol, so yes, it will vaporize at a lower temp than pure gasoline. I do have a no-touch pyrometer, but we never checked to see just how hot the rail was getting. The tools were at the other end of the paddock and I forgot I had even brought it to the race. I think that with the right testing and countermeasures, I can eliminate all of the fuel heat issues. At that point, we can concentrate on the actual tuning.

Hey Bonzi, yes, the plan is to do exactly what you said. The plan is to remove the steel pads from the front rail mounts and replace them with some sort of insulators like the carb/fuel pump spacers. If I drill out the holes in the rail mounts and run the insulators on both sides of the rail brackets, I think the heat transfer through the bolts should be greatly reduced. There is no need to run all four mounts either. 2 or 3 should be plenty. I am still running the OE silver asbestos(?) wrap. I will replace it with a more modern heat wrap to improve the insulating properties. I am thinking about engineering a simple loop cooler and pump system that would run a water pipe along side the fuel pipes in the rail and under the heat wrap. I would make a loop in the airstream, install a small reservoir and use a tiny electric pump on a toggle switch. It could be switched on only at high ambient temps or during pit stops to keep the rail cool. Anybody ever tried this?

I should have been clearer when I said the problem was after right hand corners. Nelson Ledges is a VERY fast track and it flows very well turn-to-turn. The one RH turn is very tight and leads onto the front straight and the other is a 180° banked turn leading to the back straight. I'm not sure that the direction of the turns was a factor as much as the loading followed by a hard acceleration run. I did not try to open the enrichment (choke) THIS race, so I can't say if it would have helped. I have tried it in the past when the car wouldn't rev past 5k RPM and it did not help. I haven't gotten the fuel logs yet from my teammate, but when I do, I'll calculate the GPH (gallons per hour) and MPG. GPH is the standard race terminology since that's what matters to us. I'd say we are about 7 GPH which is in the ballpark for our car.

Yes, it acts up under hard throttle. The explanation I got is that the plugs get wet while leaned over hard and then it takes a few seconds for them to fire properly again. I would love to see us keep the L26 AND be competitive, but I'm not sure we can do that without spending big bucks on the engine which we won't do. I went through the lap report today and if I remove all the lost time stuck in the pits due to vapor lock alone, we'd gain over 100 laps. That would have moved us up from 30th place to around 13th place. Fix the other fuel delivery issues to make the car run better and we could have been a top 10 car without actually being much faster than we are now. We still would have been down close to 100 laps to the winner, but it would be a respectable finish.

After a few emails back and forth to my teammates, it sounds like in 2012, we will be sticking with the L26 and tuning it better after getting all of the fuel issues worked out. If it's still too slow, then we will upgrade next off-season. Any recommendations for a Wideband O2?

You are on the right track. We will probably install a wideband O2 sensor to see what's going on. It doesn't count against us as it's considered information only and doesn't affect the performance. One suggestion I got from a fellow CC racer is that we are cooking the fuel due to the use of the stock fuel rail which is bolted to the head in the original four locations. All of that head heat is transmitted right to the metal rail and is then captured by the OE heat protecting wrap. I'm sure the rail was probably too hot to touch, so it makes sense. We don't run any of the OE emissions equipment. The EGR and air pump are gone as are the rest of the stuff. The "spillover" theory that a racer told me makes the most sense. It's when the car goes rich mid-turn due to high float heights and then sputters off the corners until the plugs dry off. I will talk to Steve and Bruce at ZT and see what they say. Our biggest problem is that even at night when the car ran damn near perfect and we turned our fasted race lap, we were STILL 12 seconds off the leader's best lap and the slowest "fastest lap" of any car. Granted, there was only a 10% spread through the field, but we are still too slow. I'm thinking that we could improve the overall running and eliminate the lost laps due to vapor lock, but it won't be enough to even be a mid-pack car in lap times. We need more HP. We can either try to eek out what we can with the L26, swap in a L28ET, or go radical and swap a V8 or other motor in the car. I would really rather not go the V8 route, but I am not against a turbo swap. After a quick CL search, I found a <100k turbo motor for $500. I'd rather find a whole ZX Turbo, but those aren't exactly common in the rust belt. Thoughts???

Yes, that's what we run. We still use the old RT-615, not the new RT-615K.

Dave, I need to research the rules and see how much a turbo is worth to the budget. Then I need to spend the winter searching CL and ebay ads for cheap Z cars. ChumpCar uses a system called AIV or Average Internet Value. We have to produce ten ads for cars like ours and the average ASKING price is your AIV. The cars must run to qualify and they must be the same make, model and option list. For old cars like the Z, they allow us to use all S30's even though they might have different engine sizes than the car we run. For this race, I came up with an AIV of $415. That means I could have $85 worth of mods for a $500 max value. Keep in mind that COST never factor into AIV. It's all about VALUE. In other words, if I buy a Rebello stroker motor from a friend for $85, it's not going to fly. They have value assigned to many common upgrades. Have aftermarket bars? They are worth $50 each. Springs, camber plates, and other mods have similar minimum VALUES assigned. I say minimum because the value can go up if they are more than cheap aftermarket parts. Chinese ebay coilovers are worth far less than real race coilovers, for example. I have never seen turbo values listed, but a junkyard turbo motor can be had for what, $150? That means I'd have to get my AIV down to roughly $350.

No, we didn't try anything with the hood this time. We did try it in the past, but that was before any of the recent changes. We don't have a hood latch and we run hood pins, so we'd have to remove it and we have lights mounted to the front of the hood, so we'd have to unhook the wiring to those as well. We did consider taking a cutoff wheel to the hood and cutting a big hole over the carbs. I'm pretty sure I still have a vented '78 hood, so we might paint that one up and use it instead for future races.

Rich? Hmmm, I always thought that hot exhaust meant lean. Makes sense, I guess. And yes, we are still using the stock rail. I guess it's time to ditch that too. It's still bolted to the head in the stock four locations.

I forgot to discuss a few more details about the running issues. One thing we noticed is that during normal operation, our temp gauge reads about 180F, but at track speeds, it reads only about 130F. This is with a brand new 180F thermostat. The engine is clearly getting plenty warm if the exhaust manifold is glowing red, but why is the water temp so low? To try to help the vapor lock issues, I made a heat shield that protects the fuel bowls from the exhaust heat, but it didn't help at all. When we had our high RPM issues, I replaced the bowl to nozzle hoses with stiffer clear Tygon hose with no improvement. At about 5am, I had a nice discussion with a fellow racer who knows old Japanese carb cars very well. He said that our stumble exiting corners is due to "spill over", a condition where the floats are set too high and the fuel is forced up the nozzles in long corners. The car goes rich in the corner and the plugs get wet. It takes several seconds for the plugs to dry and fire properly again causing the acceleration stumble after a hard corner. He went on to say that to lower the floats, I need to drill the jets bigger to allow fuel to flow into the bowls faster to avoid the high RPM starvation. Raising the floats like I did fixes one problem, but causes another. It was a good trade-off, but drilling the jets out and lowering the floats a bit should let it rev as well as fix the stumble. We will make a more permanent bracket for the fuel pump (the current one is really chumpy as it was made in 10 minutes from 22 gauge sheet metal), but we still haven't figured out how to fix the fuel temp issues. The return system doesn't help the fuel that's sitting in the bowls. Why is the exhaust manifold so hot? Is that normal? Hot normally means lean, but we already have SM needles and have fattened it up by raising the floats. Even when running perfectly, we really need more power, so we might have to look at a L28 or even a turbo L28. We just have to do it on a shoestring budget to stay legal.

OK, be prepared for a long post... We went out on the track Friday morning for practice and the car immediately exhibited the same issues as before. We pinched off the return line with no improvement and kept trying different things to no avail. At one point, we went to restart the car and the battery was dead. We checked voltage and it appeared the alternator was not working. We had a new one with us, so we installed it with no improvement. We then swapped the voltage regulator with no luck before we started tracing back every wire in the car. The problem turned out to be a missing wire that was removed during wiring cleanup. A teammate had inadvertently removed the wire that powers the alternator! With the wire back in place, we were once again charging and we figured that our high RPM issue might have been caused by low voltage to the coil. It was now 4pm and we still had to go through tech, so daytime practice was over and we had very little track time. We got through tech and prepared the car for night practice which started at 7:30pm. The car ran way better and we thought we had been chasing fuel issues when it was really low voltage this time. We swapped tires and did the final checks Friday night before we hit the sack. Saturday morning came and we took the green flag at 10am. The weather was beautiful, and the air was still cool. There is a 2 hour driver stint limit and with our new tank, we should be able to run that long, but after 1.5 hours, the driver radioed in saying he needed fuel. The car took only 10 gallons to fill and we were back on the track. He said that the car ran well and made power to 6500 RPM, but it stumbled off turn 13, the tight right-hander leading to the front straight. The second driver again went 1.5 hours and used 10 gallons of fuel before the car began to backfire on decel and sputter out of the turns. By now, it was a little after 1pm and the temperature was up into the high 70's with bright sun. The car began running worse and worse on the straights going back to its old habits of not revving past 5000 RPM. This time, when the driver came into the pits for fuel and stopped at the beginning of pit road to get his timer, the car died(they put a magnetic timer on the roof of every car entering the pits to make sure you spend a full 5 minutes in the pits for fuel stops). We pushed the car to our pit stall and fueled it up. When he tried to restart, it had all the signs of vapor lock. The car tried and tried to start, but wouldn't keep running. We lost almost 15 minutes before we finally got it going. We cycled through the drivers and it kept running worse and worse through the day. At every fuel stop, it would refuse to restart hot and we kept losing time. Our fuel pump was struggling to prime and fuel pressure was sometimes good and other times not during engine restarts. We tried every combination of return open and closed. We then decided to go back to the paddock and install the mechanical pump in series with the electric pump. We lost a lot of time and when we finished, it made the problem worse, not better. At was now 5pm and the race was checkered for a 1 hour safety break to rotate corner workers. After a 15 minute drivers meeting, we got busy making changes. We removed the electric fuel pump and made a bracket to drop it down a foot lower to be right at the height of the bottom of the fuel tank. We were sure that the pump couldn't lift the fuel to prime once we got low on fuel and sucked some air. We also removed the mechanical pump again and we were ready for the 6pm restart. I finally got my turn at the wheel after the restart and the car ran great other than the stumble down the front straight and back straight after right hand turns. All was fine for 20 laps of so until a full course caution and the safety truck came out. The truck was going very slowly and we came to a full stop as we waited for a tow truck to extract a car from the mud. As soon as we stopped, the car died on me and wouldn't restart. I was dead in the center of the track with classic vapor lock symptoms. I tried for several minutes to refire it on the track, but it wouldn't catch and I had to be towed back in. After we iced the carbs and it cooled a bit, it fired back up and I was back on the track. It ran great other than the two stumble spots. As my stint finished, it was just getting dark out. It is now 7:40pm and it's dark out. We are in 50th position out of 75 teams. The temps began to drop right away and the car ran better and better. We never missed a beat over night and by sunrise we had climbed to 39th place. The stumbles went away completely by the time I got my next stint at 3am and the car was running perfectly. It made power to 6500 and was able to keep up with most of the other cars. One thing that showed up in the night was that when we came into the pits and popped the hood, the exhaust manifold was always glowing BRIGHT red. I assume this was happening all race and we could only see it at night, but I can't say for sure. Now that we lowered the pump, we never had any priming issues and we could use more of the tanks capacity. Sunrise over Northeast Ohio and the race was stopped for a quick drivers meeting. Overnight was some of the worst driving I have ever witnessed on a racetrack. There were cars going off everywhere and in the first 17 hours of the race, we had 6 rollovers!!! All teams got a stern warning to stop driving like asshats and we were back to racing. We kept gaining spots and we were in 37th place at 8:45am. The next to last driver got in the car and ran his 1:45 stint. He came in at 9:25 and said that it was starting to stumble more and not rev all the way. He also said that the tires were really losing grip and that I'd have to go longer on gas than anyone else was able to do and just bring it home with what I had to work with. I got in the car to finish the final 2 hours of the race at 10:30am. The car was running even better than it did overnight and unlike overnight, I had a lot of clear track to work with. It was the best 30 minutes I have ever had on a race track. I had several close calls though. After only a few laps on the track, I entered Oak Tree, a banked left hander, in the outside lane and I there was a very fast V8 inside of me. I heard his tires howling and I knew he wasn't going to hold his line. He slid across the track and I was prepared to get hit. He nailed me in the rear bumper and I quickly corrected and saved it. He got the black flag the next time by the start finish line. After another few laps, three other cars spun right in front of me and I was always able to avoid them as they blocked my path. Unfortunately, I lost communication with my crew only a few minutes into my stint, so I had no idea how long I had been in the car or how much time was left in the race. Not knowing how long I had been in the car, it started backfiring on decal and really stumbling coming out of corners. This is exactly what it does when getting low on fuel. With no pit communication, I ducked into the pits to get fuel. This was the wrong thing to do! As soon as I cam to a stop at our stall, the car died. I asked how long I had been out and the answer was only 45 minutes! Oops! There is no way I was low on fuel, so the problem was simply that the car running poorly due to the hot weather and ongoing fuel issues. The car refused to restart for several minutes. I got back on the track with my communication working again and I just drove what I had and worked around the poor running. With my poor decision to stop, I lost 2 positions. I ran the car as hard as I could and took the checkers after 25:25:25. We finished in 30th place and logged 698 laps and close to 1400 miles. In the awards ceremony, they again scolded the field for terrible driving and said that nearly every car in the race was damaged. The ChumpCar staff had talked it over after the race and asked the corner workers if there were any cars that didn't have any damage and were never called out for going off track or running into anybody else. They concluded that only one car ran a truly clean race and they announced the #46 Broke Racing Effluence Datsun as the "Mr. Clean" award winner. It was really cool getting another award. Last year, we won an award for the best looking car. After the race, we spoke with many teams who told us how pleased they were with our driving. We took the oldest car in the field by a decade and completed the longest endurance race ever. We were never fast on the straights, but I'd say we have the handling dialed in near perfect. We started the race on used 195/60R14 Falken tires that ran our first 24 hour race two years ago. They ran 185 laps in that race and 698 laps in this race and they are still not to the wear bars and they have worn perfectly evenly across the tread. The Porterfield R4-E brake pads have now run 14+ hours at GingerMan, two track days, and 25+ hours at Nelson Ledges. We never even replaced the brake rotors that were on the car when we bought it two years ago. We were ecstatic with our race overall and we will figure out and fix the issues before next season. Thanks to all who helped us!

I'm WAY too tired to go into the details, but the car ran terrible at times and great at times. In 25 hours, 25 minutes and 25 seconds (25:25:25), we completed 698 laps for a total of just under 1400 miles! We finished 30th out of 75 entries and had a great time. The handling was amazing and the motor ran great at night when it was cold. We had terrible vapor lock and other heat related fuel issues in the heat of the day. Thanks to all who helped and I promise to give a full race report with the symptoms and fixes once I get a shower and some sleep. I haven't done either since Thursday. BTW, we won the Mr. Clean award for the cleanest driving. The Datsun only has one scuff in the fender and a chunk out of the front bumper. Both were caused by other drivers sliding into us in the middle of the night.

I want to thank everybody for your help and support. The Z is on its way to the race and I am just awaiting another teammate with the camper to arrive at my house. We should roll into Nelson Ledges around 11pm tonight and we'll know tomorrow if it runs right. I won't likely have any internet signal, but if I do, I'll let everyone know how it goes tomorrow. The race starts at 10am Saturday and finishes at 12:30pm on Sunday. Other than an hour safety break to rotate corner workers, we go straight through for a total race time of 25:25:25. Fingers crossed...

Here would be my short list of changes: Same body shape and design, but with slight tweaks for better aerodynamics to avoid exhaust fumes and front end lift Better spindle pin design so there wouldn't need to be "right of passage" for future owners Better rust protection Better differential front mount design Timing chain tensioner that can't pop out of position when the chain isn't wedged Better dash pad material that wouldn't crack in a few years

Hey Captain, you aren't THAT far away. The race is at Nelson Ledges in NE Ohio near the PA line which is about 5.5 hours from Philly. Yes, we have a Friday test day at the track to prove out our fixes. I raised the floats a bit, but didn't want to raise them way above the FSM specs. According to Bruce, the fuel should be 1/16" below the nozzle in the carbs when tuned. I raised the floats several mm, but still couldn't get them near 1/16". If needed, I'll raise them some more at the track. I have a question for those of you who have performance cams. My cam specs are .450 lift, 260/260 duration. What kind of vacuum do you get at idle? I'm getting about 13" hg which would be low for a stock cam, but I can't recall what it should be with that cam.