11/05/2024 Santa Pod Raceway England
After setting a new personal best of a 10.913 second quarter mile during our last test day and seeing hot weather on the forecast for the 11th of May we were keen to get me back in the challenger to see how it handled the heat.
Meeting Steve from Dodge Ram UK at the track just in time for the first line up, the car was ready and roaring to go and see if the blistering sun would have any effect on our times, we all thought that the increase in temperature would allow the strip to become stickier allowing for better traction off the line but none of us were expecting what happened next.
My warmup run was good putting in a time of 11.1 seconds only 0.2 seconds off my latest personal best, sadly the heat would prove difficult for the challenger to handle as after the next few runs the air intake quickly rose to 65°C and wouldn’t reduce even after adding ice bags to the supercharger and air intake, this wasn’t a bad operating temperature for the car by any means but to generate our peak power figures we would need cooler air entering the engine.
With this new data our times gradually increased as the car simply wasn’t generating enough power to keep us near our 10.9 second personal best and wasn’t able to put the power down consistently due to the now spent tyres.
After an assessment of the day, we concluded we need a few more upgrades to keep us climbing towards a lower time in preparation for Street Weekend, those shall be kept as a surprise but let’s just say they will be grabbing air.