Gremlin Traction Woes

What P.S.I. hot in the tires?

WesternRed wrote: Looking at moving weight around, about the only thing I can think of is moving the battery from the engine bay to the rear, but this would only be an incremental change.

That is the first thing I would change. That alone depending on the battery your using could be a 2% change in front to rear weigh bias. The other thing I would do if that doesn't yield you enough gain is re-install the back bumper. You cant go fast, and you cant be consistent if you can't hook it up. I have friend that has a Duster. One winter he decided he needed to put the rear of the car on a diet, so he bought aluminum center section (9" Ford rear), aluminum spool, light weight wheels, fiberglass truck lid, fiberglass bumper, lexan rear window, and a lite weigh battery. He worked at it and removed 150# of weight. The car slowed down .15 in the 1/8 mile. He bought new tries and tried everything to get the performance back to no avail. After a half of a season of banging his head on the wall he finally listened to an old racer that had 50-years of racing experience and brought the car to him. The next day he had the car ready for him to run again, but he wouldn't tell him what he did to it and told him to just go race it. Couple days later he took it to the track and amazingly the car ran the numbers it had prior to the very expensive weight lose program. So what did the old racer do to make to run again? He took the rear fiberglass bumper off and made a really thick steel plate that fit hidden inside the rear bumper. That plate weighed 150#. I've never forgot that story and I've never removed weight from the rear of a bracket car that didn't have a 4-link suspension from that day forward. 

Edited by PROSTOCKTOM - Oct/20/2020 at 6:19am

From reading one of the articles on that Gremlin, the Caltracs made a big difference, so that’s probably a consideration.

The control freak setup looks nice, but maybe overkill for what I'm trying to achieve.

Roll on with the quick fixes for now, front shock spacers:



Gives me this much extension, which is about 1/2" more than before given other limitations that come into play. Hard to imagine it ever gets anywhere near this high on the track:



Probably going to have to lower the front and look at some options to get rid of the rubber bits to loosen it up a bit more in slightly longer term.

Also decided to knock out a new timing map to bring most of the advance in between 4000 and 5000 rpm, the boxed section is the only bit that really matters here. I can load this fairly easily on the night to see if it helps:



Battery location will be the next in order of priority. I have put an enquiry in with the Aussie Caltrac distributor to see if they can supply some before looking further afield as they are not really that expensive in the scheme of things.

Back to more mundane stuff, started work on the battery re-location, a mate at work is going to zip it up for me:

Edited by WesternRed - Oct/23/2020 at 5:55pm