I've posted here numerous times in the past 9 months about the problems I've been having with this car. Finally I've found and repaired the problems. This might be a bit long but hopefully it will help some of you guys who may have been having the same problems I have. Around a year ago, my car started getting pretty inconsistent at the track. I purchased a scanmaster hoping that maybe it might give me some insight as to what the problem was. During normal driving, I sometimes feel a little surging. I do have a cam and know that this is something that could be expected but because I'd had the cam for over a year, I knew this was something new. The scanmaster was showing 12 degrees of knock retard just by tapping the throttle. I could find no answers as to what the problem was so after trying 104 octane gas and having the problem not go away, decided to just get a resister to disable the KS thinking that it was maybe false knock. I raced ocassionally throughout the year but not nearly as much as I would've liked. Couple these problems with my numerous tranny issues, it really wasn't much fun going to the track anymore. I ended the year by going to a built 700r4 tranny just so I wouldn't have those obd1 blues. The tranny worked fine but my performance was still falling off. One day at the track, my mph went from 107 to 110 back to 104, with no changes being made to the car at all. This particular day everyone was setting new bests so I know the air was great. I should've been seeing close to 114. I decided to check some of the valve springs. I tested 5...1 was bad. I changed them all. Problem not solved. I started thinking maybe it was a fuel problem. I installed an inline pump to boost the pressure. That didn't fix it either. I changed the injectors to 30# and had the computer programmed. No deal. Finally last week, I decided to pull out the old set of stock lifters I had replaced when I had the head/cam package installed. I cleaned them up and installed them. These lifters had around 40k miles on them when I pulled them out so I figured that by replacing them, since the motor was being pulled apart, it would've been good insurance and one less thing I would've had to worry about. I replaced them with crane oe lifters that currently have lasted only around 10k miles. Needless to say, my problem is now fixed. After a couple trips to the track in the past week, my mph is now back to where it should be. I'm willing to bet that this is where my scanmaster was picking up the false knock from. I'm going to remove the resister this week and will post the results. Sorry for the length of this post but hopefully someone else who reads this might benefit from my mistakes.
'lying

 

Let me add that one day I pulled the valve covers off and found that I was able to actually pull back on some of the rockers enough to be able to swing them completely off the valve. This was when the motor was cold. They weren't particularly loud so I found that very puzzling. When the motor was warm, I wasn't able to repeat it. I still found it strange but wasn't able to find someone who has attempted to do this. I know that the lifters will bleed down but I didn't think that was normal.

 

The lifters bleed down, but there is also a spring in there that should keep tension on them. IMO if you you could swing the rocker off the pushrod, that should have been a major clue that there was something wrong.

 

That is actually when I decided to change the lifters.

 

Amen.