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© 1999 Brian F. Schreurs
Even we have a disclaimer.

The Charger lines up for its first drag race in half a decade.

Passing tech at Capitol Raceway on a Sunday test-n-tune is simplicity itself. All they did was ask us, ask us, whether we had an overflow container for the radiator and a hold-down strap for the battery. The hood never even came up. We did have those items but it made us wonder about the other beaters in attendance.

Track time proved to be limited due to breakage. No, not our Charger. It held up fine. A supercharged Firebird swallowed its blower and a Mustang blew something. We don't know what. In the finest Capitol Raceway tradition, they never bothered to tell us what was going on. So helpful, these people. This track is the worst in the region for tower to participant communications. Even my nine-year-old cousin, Jesse, saw that.

"At that other track, they talked a lot more," he said. "They told you who was driving, what kind of car it was, how fast it went, and if something broke they told you what broke. They don't say anything here."

During the considerable amount of downtime, we discovered that Chargers are more popular than Firebirds. We almost never get any comments with the Paradise Garage Firebird Formula. People look but move on. Not so with the Charger. All kinds of people stopped to chat about the car and how it was running. This is particularly amazing at Capitol, where the racers are known to be very judgmental about opponents' cars.

Capitol also requires racers to pass through the waterbox, even cars on street tires. No doubt this annoyed the street cars a fair amount (including us) but matters were certainly worse for the cars behind us. The Charger has an open differential which means that only one wheel spins in a burnout. The other wheel was free to track water halfway down the track.

Frankly, we're not accustomed to losing this badly.

For our first round, we lined up against a new Jeep Grand Cherokee. We did our one-wheel burnout and staged, preloading the torque converter. We beat him out of the hole by a tenth, and added another half-tenth at the 60-foot mark. But it was for naught. By the 1000-foot mark he was past us. It might have been even sooner, but good old Capitol didn't have the 1/8-mile timers working properly, so we don't know our eighth-mile times.

Just like we discovered at the dyno baseline, the Charger has no top-end power. As soon as the rpm started to climb, we started to lose.

During the hour of downtime between rounds one and two, we increased the mixture screws by half a turn, on the theory that maybe the engine was leaning out near the top. That took about a minute, so for the rest of the hour we sat around wondering what was going on.

When we finally lined up for our second pass, we were paired off with fellow MAFB member Bob Reese and his way-fast Comp T/A. Alas, the Charger's engine stalled after our one-legged burnout! It took us several tries to fire the engine so they let Bob go solo. What a shame. Instead, we raced a red Firebird that we didn't recognize. Of course, we lost, by three and a half seconds. But that's not the point. We scored a cool 17.0!

Two and a half hours later we finally got our third pass in.Well, since Capitol didn't see fit to warn the racers we were starting up again, no one had a chance to warm up their engines, including us. We weren't ready, the car wasn't ready, it just plain wasn't a good deal. Hey Capitol, you can use those fancy PAs for things besides paging coworkers ya know!! We eked out a 17.3 on this final run.

Despite Capitol Raceway's best efforts to ruin the day for us, we were still glad to get our baseline track test in before winter. We were looking for something humorous to laugh at after the project is done, and 17.0 @ 79 mph ought to do it. We'll be back at the track to retest the Charger as soon as the new engine finds its way behind the radiator.