Needless to say, the Southern Shootout was fun. We fought transmission problems ALL weekend and ended up smoking the first transmission by Saturday afternoon. With some thrashing, we had the car back together in time for some time trials Sunday morning. The tuning was off, and I ended up having to manually shift the car. Anyone with a 4L60E-equipped car will understand how that goes! The computer gets very mad about it and puts you straight into the limiter on the shifts. You have to literally shift into the next gear as soon as you are in the prior gear to have any chance of not hitting the limiter.

We were trying to let the car shift itself early on and it resulted in less than mediocre 11.60's and 11.70's. I knew the car was going to hit the limiter on each shift, but we certainly could not run any worse than we were. I gave it a shot, and it worked very well! Even though we were tagging the limiter, it was still knocking quite a few tenths off of our ET. The first round for me to manually shift the car was in the semi's against J Rod's C5. It worked well, and I was looking to put just enough on my opponent to win the race. I didn't want to stress the trans anymore than I had to. I had the RT by .07 and crossed the finish line with an 11.31. I was anxious to see what the car would do in the finals with a complete all-out pass against Mark @ Raging Motorsports. His car had run a 10.94 earlier that day during time trials, so I knew we had our hands full!

In the finals, it was time to run it through the back door with everything we had. The car left hard with a 1.459 60' and charged hard all the way down the track. It tagged the limiter a little on the 1-2 shift, but the trans still managed to shift without me getting out of the throttle completely. I shoved the shifter into third as soon as the trans was in second, and it nailed the 2-3 shift perfectly at 6600 RPM. The result was a 10.98 @ 122.3 MPH with a raceweight of 3,417#! This was our first 10-second pass in the Project Z, and it was the only 10-second pass during eliminations in Quick Stock. I was ecstatic to get the win light, but I had no idea that we had made a 10-second pass. When I grabbed the timeslip from the ET booth I nearly fell out of the car! I rolled onto the scales to verify raceweight, and then we headed back to the pits to pull some weight out. We had to add our trailer spare tire, two sets of jack stands, and a jack to meet the minimum weight of 3,400#. It was odd because we weighed the car in Lubbock before heading to Louisiana, and it tipped the scales at 3,340# without a driver on stock rear wheels/tires. When we weighed the car at No Problem Raceway, it weighed in at 3,308# with me in it! :eek2: That's a huge discrepancy, but we compensated.

I quickly headed back to the starting line before they shut the lanes down to see what she would do with some weight out of her. I did my burnout and rolled to the line. The car left hard again with a 1.43 60' and made a near picture-perfect pass. The result was a 10.78 @ 124 MPH with a raceweight of 3,278#. It was the best pass, by far, that we had all weekend, but it still wasn't what we wanted. It still hit the limiter on the 1-2 shift a little. This was literally a perfect ending to a very iffy weekend. We knew the car had the potential to win the class, but it was just getting everything to work together. It was a good thing that we brought a spare 4L60E. We still have plenty of tuning issues to work out to get the car to shift well on its own, but she didn't seem to mind being manually shifted too much.

I want to thank Kevin at TCI and Terry at Patriot Performance for their help all weekend. They were both there helping all weekend to make the car run to its full potential. Kevin was under the car with us swapping trannies, even though we had a swarm of the largest mosquitoes known to man!

Here's a rundown on the TSP Project Z:

*Patriot Performance stage II LS6-Style Cylinder Heads with 59cc chambers
*TSP "Magic Stick" Camshaft
*TCI Competition 4400 torque converter
*4.10:1 GM Motive Gears in factory 10-bolt rearend
*TSP 85mm Induction Package
*PaceSetter Long Tube Headers with 24" extensions
*Convo Pro wheels with VW tires in front and Hoosier 26x10x15 slicks out back
*TSP ported throttle body
*TSP custom dyno tuning
*Meziere electric water pump
*LS6 intake manifold


Jason
Texas Speed & Performance