Optima Search For the Ultimate Street Car, NCM Edition

You may remember my post last year about attending the Optima Search For the Ultimate Street Car event at the National Corvette Museum Motorsports Park. You may remember that weekend ended with the car on a trailer being towed home after some serious electrical issues disabled the ECM and later, the cooling fans. That is not …

Midwest Muscle Car Challenge 2017 – It finally made it

This past weekend I had the distinct honor of participating in the the Midwest Muscle Car Challenge, brought us by the good folks at Bowler Transmission. There’s so much to unpack from the weekend, so I’ll start at the beginning. First, the event format. It’s a track day combined with a highway cruise combined with …

Installing a proper swaybar on a G-Body

“If you can raid the NASCAR parts bin, do it.” – Dennis Grant So, in my last entry, I barfed out my thoughts on sway bars for my car. Today’s entry is me actually acting on those thoughts. Today is a step-by-step on how I put a three piece swaybar on my 1987 Grand National. …

On the topic of anti-sway bars

UPDATE: Education and experience has changed my views on some of this! See below for an update on rear swaybars before following the bad advice I wrote up here when I was stupid.   Anti-sway bars are the stuff of myth and legend. Especially for the General Motors Metric mid-size platform (the G-Body). You can …

The Road to (and from) the Optima Search for the Ultimate Street Car

Fair warning, this will be longer than a typical post. Way back in February, I did something crazy. I entered the Optima Search for the Ultimate Street Car event schedule for the NCM Motorsports Park the weekend of June 10th. At the same time, I ordered my big Weld RT-S71B forged 18×9.5″ wheels. I was …

This thing actually works pretty good!

So, there have been more than a few posts on here regarding  my foolish endeavors prepping my Grand National for SCCA autocross competition. Some regard it as silliness, most others think it’s pretty badass. I’m having fun with it, though, and that’s all that really matters. That, and results. Is what I’m doing working? How …

Cadillac CTS-V and the steering thing

My Cadillac CTS-V sprang a really bad power steering leak the other day. Big leak. Giant puddle on the floor. Turns out it was the pinion seal on the rack and pinion assembly. Changing in the car would be a bit insane, so I had to pull the rack. Now, there’s no procedure for removing …