So I am standing around the autocross at the Holley LS Fest in Bowling green, Ky. On Saturday about noon when Bill Tichnor from Holley introduces me to this scruffy looking group of guys [Justin and his guys from the Hotrod Barn in Williamsburg Iowa] that had just won the LS engine swap contest. They swapped out a small block and installed a new LS6 engine is 31 minutes. [same swap on our Chevelle took Greg 2 weeksJ]. While they were doing their winners interview for TV and radio they mentioned that the next project they wanted to do for the car was a complete RideTech suspension.
At that point I told them that if they would do the swap in the parking lot in front of our booth that I would give them the complete suspension. We happened to have the Chevelle display chassis at that show with all of our stuff on it so it was a matter of unbolting the display stuff and installing it on their car. They accomplished this in 3 hours and 6 minutes. This was with no preparation, no “pre-disassembly” no WD40 on the bolts, nothing.
We also had the foresight to make a couple of autocross runs before we did the swap for a baseline performance comparison. After the installation was complete we went out again.
16 SECONDS FASTER!
The "before" run was 1:30. After the install…1:14. This was with the same rock hard tires, same drum brakes, same bench seat and no power steering, and with no shock tuning, no air pressure tuning, and no frontend alignment. [It was also with the oem spindles because our taller spindles wouldn't work with their drum brakes]
Yes, I was driving both times. No, I wasn't sandbagging on the before runs. [the video will make that clear!]
Car Craft Magazine and Popular Hotrodding Magazine covered the whole thing. We also have a full video that Scott is editing right now. I’ll get that up asap.
As for verification...Jeff Smith, David Freiburger, Rob Kinnan, Steven Rupp, Nick Licata, Johnny Hunkins, Henry De Los Santos, Sean Haggai and probably several other magazine editors saw it all happen.
And now, in the name of complete shameless self promotion...here is the stuff he put on:
http://www.ridetech.com/store/suspen...y-level-3.html