Hey Everyone. Ever since I moved to college in PA, I've been tempted to go to a race track / drag strip just to experience it all and have some fun with my car without the cops breathing down my neck. Luckily, I found a drag strip near by called "Island Dragway". I've searched it on this forum before and It seems like a good track and many members have gone before, so that's a good sign. Anyways, I'm a bit concerned about going mainly for one reason.... The well-being of my car. My car has 142k miles on it and is meticulously maintained as I'm sure some of you have seen my maintenance post. Anyways 142,000 Miles is a lot of miles, the Clutch is less than stellar, and my tires are brand new. So I I'm a bit concerned about something going wrong with my vehicle. Thus far she has been extremely reliable, and runs butter smooth, but regardless 9-10 years on a vehicle and 142k miles kind of worries me. I wouldn't be launching, I wouldn't be redlining it at 6500 RPM, I'm just going to have some fun and maybe win a race or two against some really craptastic cars. I'm confident in my driving ability and my ability to learn, but I'm a little less confident in the strength in my most likely old OEM parts.
What do you think guys? Anyone have experience at the strip / racing with that many miles on their cavy?
I've raced a bit this year, and I haven't had any problems. Cavy has 27xxxx on her.
I wouldn't do it unless you have the time/money to put into the car incase it breaks. You beat on the car, you can expect to break things, and a clutch with that many miles won't take much to heat up and begin to slip.
blucavvy wrote:ld9?
Yes my car has the LD9 engine.
SLOCAV wrote:I wouldn't do it unless you have the time/money to put into the car incase it breaks. You beat on the car, you can expect to break things, and a clutch with that many miles won't take much to heat up and begin to slip.
Yeah that's what I'm leaning towards. I have the money to fix pretty much anything on the car, even a new engine, but I'm a long 2 hours away from home; the tow bill would be quite steep... I'm not sure about the clutch, it definitely isn't brand new, but I'm not sure if it's stock or not. Wouldn't surprise me if it was, but the dealer I bought it from never told me. It seemed like they just bought it as is and flipped em after some routine maintenance.
Going to guess it is the stock clutch, just be ready to put some time and money into the car if you start to race it. I'm sure a FEW races won't hurt it, but don't hot lap the car and go a dozen times.
Make sure you have a back up in case you snap an axle or something
I'm thinking maybe I should hold off until I get a new clutch in this car, the drive axle wouldn't be too big of a deal if I was closer to home. I just wanna have some fun and see what kinda numbers she'd run. I wasn't planning on spending all day there and doing a dozen runs though. I've read though that this car does a pretty good job of snapping a drive shaft on the 1-2 shift.
I say go for it..
The stock clutch can take some serious abuse...I had probably 2-300 passes at the strip on my stock clutch, plus street abuse, most of those were with drag slicks. It never slipped on me once, it wasn't in the greatest shape when I pulled it out for my aftermarket one...but it still held fine and probably would of lasted another season or two.
Even if it does start to slip, you can easily drive it home still so long as you don't keep beating on it once its starts slipping and even if you do...you can still probably limp it home if you are carefull with it.
The stock axles are plenty strong...some people break them and some don't. Biggest thing here is wheel hop, it will kill axles and diffs if you experiance it enough. If one does break it is a pretty simple swap even at the track, takes maybe only 30 mins and can be done easily with just hand tools.
So ya, biggest thing if you do race it, it start to get wheel hop let off the gas ASAP or things will break, other than that I wouldn't worry to much and go have some fun!
My car with LD9 has 206k on it....Id take it to the strip in a heartbeat if i didnt already know it was slow.
I went quite often for about a year, did 40 some runs and never had a problem. The next year I broke a shift cable on my second run... @!#$ happens. If you don't have the money to fix it I wouldn't do it.
Also, you can tell yourself you aren't going to beat on it, but by about the 3rd run you'll be slamming shifts and using all the revs, it's called being a guy, haha.
Paying someone to install parts and bragging about it being fast, is like watching someone bang your wife and being proud to raise their kids.
^^ lol, truth!
OP: if ur worried about it just trailer it, man.
-Z Yaaaa- wrote:^^ lol, truth!
OP: if ur worried about it just trailer it, man.
Yup, renting a uhaul trailer and truck for the night is like 250 bucks.
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The one sure thing in racing is broken parts. It might not happen every time, it might not happen for a long time, but someday, it will happen, so you'd best be prepared for it one way or another before making the decision to pull up to the staging lanes. If you don't have a buddy that can tow it home in an emergency I recommend getting AAA coverage. Don't know if they'd cover you for racing but that's why you wipe your number off the window and push the car out to spectator parking before you call them. "Yeah, I was just about to leave from watching my buddy race his Mustang tonight and my car won't start/go into gear/whatever bull@!#$ you need to tell them".
For a stock car you're not really risking much as long as you aren't being a tool and doing big burnouts and ridiculously high-rpm launches. Shift cables and axles are probably the two biggest weak points, never hurts to have spares.
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