About a year and a half ago, I scored a '70 Chrysler Town & Country for a great price. The previous owner had lost his shirt in Sin City so he let me have the big 440 powered wagon for a thousand bucks! Viva Las Vegas! It only had eighty thousand miles on it so everything was relatively fresh but it still didn't respond to basic tuning like we thought it should. We surmised that it was time to install a new timing set. While we were at it, we swapped on a fresh Edelbrock/Carter 750 cfm carburetor. After that, it ran hard. We took it to the track where it ran a best time of 15.84 at 86.8 MPH, not bad for a 4800 pound monster! I was still driving it on the street during the week, I just raced it because my fast car was down and I wanted to smell some burning rubber before winter set in.
This year, I put my friend Matt Hatfield behind the wheel to run in Sportsman class bracket racing. He's a great guy who's done me plenty of favors and I thought he would be a good drag racer because he is a drummer and he takes instruction well. It turned out that I was right. He could cut good lights from the first time out and is an avid student of the sport. As the year progressed, we still didn't really have our fast car program together so we put the extra energy into the Big Green Wagon. As Matt quickly matured as a racer, we enjoyed helping him and making the car go faster and faster. After tweaking on a car where every tenth seems to cost at least a grand it was fun to work on a car where a couple of c-notes could gain us a half a second. I was still driving the car on the street during the week. Of course it got terrible gas mileage but that isn't so bad if you bring along seven of your closest friends to share the fuel bill!
One of the first things we did was to install a set of headers. The only over the counter headers for a full size C-body are the expensive Hooker Super Comps. I happened to have an old set hanging around. They were beat up but long paid for. Dr. Big Block ended up spending a couple of hours with a welder making them right again. If this project were a B-body I would have purchased a new set of cheapos. Headers are a pain in the butt but well worth the effort. Then I installed an Edelbrock Torker II intake manifold, a low single plane unit designed to fit under the hood in a stock application.
After upgrading the power with the intake and exhaust, we had to make suspension mods to improve the launch to something better than the fun but useless "John Force burnoff". In addition to rotating the pinion angle down 5 degrees we removed the anti sway bar and lowered the front end until it was sitting 1/2" off the rebound bumpers (with the driver on board, of course). There is so much to be done in this department. Making all suspension components "loose and accurate" is critical. I think it was Warren Johnson who said you should be able to push your own race car with one hand. Luckily for us, the car is very straight and rolls easily. Alignments aren't free, but then they aren't exactly expensive either. Straight cars are faster, safer and more fun to drive than crooked ones!
