Historic Racing in Birmingham
I spent the weekend attending the 2nd annual Barber Historics at Barber Motorsports Park.
This is the second event in as many years and I’ve been to both. This year there were even more cars and more things to do. What’s really great is that you get to walk around the paddocks and chat with mechanics, racers, and owners. With such a wide variety of interesting cars the action on the track can be fascinating too.
I arrived Saturday morning and caught hours of warm up laps and then the first heat races in the afternoon. On Sunday the Porsche hot laps track was open to the public so I took the old S60R for a couple laps. On track heat races got going again in the afternoon and were entertaining, particularly the sports car class that saw everything from a Lotus 7 to a Porsche 914/6, and included a classic old Daimler that looked like the offspring of a 427 Cobra and the Batmobile. Other attractions included a Bar-b-que cook off, a swap meet, the Barber Museum, and a “cars n coffee” type auto show.
Good fun for all, check it out next year. http://www.barbermotorsports.com
Minor adjustments
I spent all day Saturday at the Misfit’s car show in Bonner Montana, it was fun to see all the great cars and tons of rat rods that frequent Missoula’ s streets.
I spent most of Sunday afternoon trying to wrestle a fuel line apart so I could pull the in-tank pump out and replace with an IPD upgrade. I’ve been wrestling with fuel problems since day one. What happens is that when the tank is below about ¾ full and I corner hard the engine will starve for fuel so I suspect either a weak pump or a split pickup line. So I’ve been racing this and last season with nearly a full tank every race. IPD makes an upgrade kit that comes with all new lines, etc. so I went that route. I should probably also replace the main fuel pump with something that sprays like a fire hose but the wife has informed me that I am over budget on expenses and it’s time to stop spending. I also wired in a different stereo out of the ’76 parts car I had and I replaced the turn signal clicker which had been shorting out.
I also found a much desired and rare Zender rear trunk spoiler on Swedespeed, and that should be showing up in the mail on Thursday. The third MT challenge race is this weekend in Helena, so hopefully the pump and spoiler will be in and good to go.
Lauren Varney 