Stock Eliminator Explained, sort of...

[Music] yes welcome back to wagons of steel it's party and everyone's still invited so in my last video uh i got a request in the comments to explain how to build a stalker and why it's so hard to get heads for my 1964 plymouth and i'll start with the 64 plymouth heads first and keep this brief because it is slightly boring um [Music] uh my 64 plymouth is what's called a max wedge it's got a max wedge engine in it and max wedge engines were the top-of-the-line performance engine from 1962 to the midway through 1964 for mopar for the replaced by the mighty hemi and they change slightly every year 62 63 and 64. and um the uh 64 is the most exotic of them because in midway through they changed over to the hemi for their maximum performance engine and they didn't they they just stopped making the max wedge so there's only half a year worth of those made originally now just to continue down the rabbit hole of max wedge engine knowledge more than you ever knew you wanted they made a they reproduced the 1964 and 1963 heads which are very very similar and they did that a couple of times so there's basically three different generations of wedge heads the first one they did was i i don't really know what the timing was i think it was in the 80s or the early 90s and um they uh opar did kind of a crappy job they they didn't um they you know with all the resources they had they could have made a really nice set of reproduction max wedge heads and since you're not allowed to mess with the heads you can't pour them polish them cut them down put epoxy in them any of the performance tricks that people do on on cylinder heads you cannot do go ahead and stock the limiter more on that later when i talk a little bit more about what how to build a stalker but um so they did kind of a crappy job and um now max wedge people weren't happy with that so basically what that means is that the um the racers were still after the original max wedge heads which guess what all the people who restore original max switched out cars for you know car shows and stuff they're still out from too so they kind of put them the restorers and the racers in competition with each other and you know with racing uses abuse and eventually all the heat cycles and you know putting intake manifolds on and off and blowing up motors and you know all that stuff it takes toll so that eventually the heads are no good for anybody if you race them so mopar again made a very uh a run of max wedge heads again i don't have the exact timing of this so i could be wrong but not far off in the 2000s and this was a better version but for whatever reason uh they didn't make that many of them they didn't make as many as they said they would and i i've never been able to find a set of the second generation ones i mean i've heard about them but then i've never you know never really followed through because the long the short of it is the max wedgeheads you know they're they're a legend and everything but they're pretty obsolete like if you if you're building a high performance race car for anything but stock max wedge you would never pick a max wedge head put on your on your on your race car it's not i mean it's it was top of the line in 1964 but it's it's not top of the line in 2020 that's for sure and so there's just not that many of them out there so when i when i broke your head by letting it sit in my trailer without heat on one winter it cracked i put out the words i was looking for some heads and i i really didn't have any luck and uh so i had to repair the ones i had the one that i broke and um that uh that involves heating the head up uh so that it's glowing red and then welding it because it's made out of you know it's cast iron so it's welding cast iron for that application incredible skill i i can't you know racing in general and ma and racing stock eliminator is it's not a good idea to pay a whole lot of attention to what your uh what stuff costs because it's really expensive i i think it was like five or six hundred bucks to get that held head welded up and then you know it all had to be completely re-machined and everything after it was done so that's the story of how i ended up replacing that head and then eventually my engine guru guy dan davorak got lucky and found a set of uh untouched unrun new old stock max wedge heads for my application at a swap meet and i got those for like i think i paid 3 500 bucks for the pair which it's a good deal for those you know it's actually not a bad deal just in general but so that's the story of my max wedge heads well it's a good day to talk about stock and limiter because i'm i'm printing shirts for my friend jody lang who won the world championship in stock eliminator that's his car there as i explained i've explained before you win a championship in stock eliminator or super stock or any of the sportsman eliminators of nhra by getting more points than anybody else in three national events and five divisional events and jody finally pulled that off this year he's uh he's an awesome racer he's a legend here in division six the northwest division he's been racing as long as i've been racing he's been out there and he's a really awesome bracket racer and just i don't want to get ahead of over my skis bracket racing for people who don't understand who happened to still be watching this video after the mopar head thing um bracket racing is just what everybody does it's you know like a weekend warrior type of thing it's it's a if you bring your car to the drag strip and you're racing and you're not in some nhra eliminator you're probably bracket racing which means everybody predicts how fast their car is going to run and then they write that number in shoe polish on the window and try to get as close to that number as you can without beating it and so say my number is 10 i have 10 seconds and the guy the other lane's number is 12 seconds he'll leave two seconds before me and so theoretically i'll catch up to him at the finish line so that's it's a way of some genius figured out in the 60s this is a way to so that everybody can compete against each other it's not just you know it gets it gets discouraging to only be whoever has the fastest car wins i mean i know that it makes for a better television you know biggest engine on the street competition or whatever but um out in the real world here not on the world of televised street racing um bracket racing allows everybody to compete with each other and so um that's kind of what a lot of stock eliminator racing is is all the cars you know they write what they think their car is going to run in the window and then they try to get as close to that number as they can you uh want to have a fast reaction time you don't want to go too fast that's a red light and then so anyways that's bracket racing and there's a lot of high dollar bracket racing and that's really that's that's what most people do when they go drag racing and um stock eliminator guys stock eliminator is like one of the oldest forms of drag racing there is and um basically like it's it's sometimes i mean i don't think i'm not snobby but it can be a pretty snobby bunch of folks and um they don't like it when you call stock eliminator brad you're basically they are out there to make their combination as fast as they can be and uh but unless you're up against somebody's in the same class as you are it's bracket racing and that's why jody lying is such a badass is because he among other things he's done a lot of racket racing and unless you're a good bracket racer you're really not going to win a whole lot of the you know world championships uh in stock eliminator now i'm not going to drive everyone crazy and go off the deep end how to blueprint your engine or anything like that but the broad strokes of how to build a stock eliminator car our first you have to figure out what kind of car you want you want to have what your what your what your plan is i um i tripped into this uh to the car i had because i'm a station wagon guy and we happen to have a 1964 plymouth that looked like you'd be a good candidate and i was friends with dan devorak who's the one of the original pioneers of max wedge racing and so i kind of i just one thing one step forward another and before you know it i'm building a max wedge stalker which is i wouldn't necessarily recommend this there's a lot of heartbreak there um so there's a the nhra rule book and you can that gives you the the the rules of what you're allowed to do and not do to your stalker so um you know you're not you're not allowed to really you're not allowed to port your heads like i said earlier the cam has to be the same size as uh the stock cam you have to run the same carburetors the car has to weigh what it weighed from the factory it has to have a full interior um the biggest tires you can run on are nine by thirty so nine inch wide thirty inches tall whatever serious rules are there now they changed the rules year by year now you're allowed to run a fuel cell instead of the stock gas tank you just have to run the stock gas tank um you're allowed to put light seats in now you used to have to run the stock seat when i first started racing in stock eliminator in 2005 um some things that are different from now i had a bench seat with uh you know i had a little hole so the submarine belt so i could run you know the five point racing harness you had to have five-point racing on this but you're required to run seats that came from the factory so i had a bench seat and you were not required to wear a fireproof suit all you had to wear was a helmet so here i was in a 10 second race car in a t-shirt right rolling on a bench seat which i just i'm i'm glad to say i did now you know i have to wear the full fireplace suit and it's not the same as it used to be but that was still pretty cool and uh what other stuff i had to do there you know it's it's um picking the combination once you've picked the combination then you have to take your account in your car and make it as awesome as you can make it really really go through it like jody's wagon this car has been a race car since i've known him he's run other cars like this and in fact i learned how to drive on a car very similar to that back in 1980 i think that's what yours is anyways they um you go through it and everything has to you make all the you have a little stock suspension and everything has to be stocked but you take everything apart and make it as good as it can be you picked like you know if there was some you know classic example is like a 1964 plymouth they say it has to have the stock radiator in it well they're not necessarily going to say well which stock radiator so you can you can take the 1964 six-cylinder radiator and put it instead of the 1964 and 426 truck radiator which is what it came with and no no one's going to know the difference then you take a bunch of weight off the nose you can um uh you know the leaf springs and the the torsion bars and all the suspension pieces can be you can find the lightest stuff you can possibly get from the factory and you push it and sometimes they'll see something they don't like and they'll tell you to fix it don't do that again you know a classic example of this is you know those you get those batteries from the from the auto parts store that are they put on the counter just to you know kind of like promotional and they're not real batteries they're just an empty plastic shell and you know if you've ever worked it on a parts store you throw them at each other some sort of battery i mean then it's you know just a super light battery but um just the case and in stock you're allowed to run a battery in the trunk your your rod run a battery in the trunk and nothing else that's the way your car came but most cars didn't come that way back then and so you put a battery in the trunk that matches the battery up front and that gives you two batteries and there's there's advantages to that and so people would put one of those lightweight empty batteries up front and a real battery in the back and then somebody catches on then you get what are they comfortable called oh you get it you get a vacation for six months like the nhra says oh bad and um so then you have to not race for six months because they caught you with an empty battery in the front of your car or whatever particular cheating stuff is you know nobody likes to be called a cheater but you know stock eliminator or nascar stock or maybe just racing in general is is you know figuring out where the where the rules are ambiguous where where the rules can be pushed and uh that's what makes it interesting and in fact you know just just as a general 30 000 foot view of stock eliminator racing or super stock the thing that i think draws a lot of people to it is it's a uh it's an intellectual exercise i mean drag racing in general if you really get into it and and and uh do it and figure out what the rules are and what people are up against it's already uh it's already kind of an intellectual exercise but when you go take it to stock eliminator and you're trying to blueprint your combination to be the fastest it can be it it involves a lot of thinking and you know there's there's some interesting payoffs to it and it's a very scientific endeavor now a perfect example this is uh when i started racing stock eliminator we helped put this car together which has now gone through a couple of my friends which was a 71 or 72 comment it's probably more familiar as a maverick it's the mercury version of the maverick and um uh he had a put a 302 two barrel in it which is you know not a legendary performance engine by any stretch of the imagination but it uh the nhra the governing body had never really looked at that engine and decided how much horsepower it was worth they just kind of took the factory's word for it and so as a result it was very under factored which means it makes a lot more horsepower than the nhra thinks so then immediately gives you a that gives you a advantage from the beginning so then you don't have to you don't have to do every trick in the book to make your car competitive um yeah so it's so hard to explain stock eliminator i find myself kind of getting getting ahead of myself when i try to explain to people competitive any there's there's something in in stock eliminator called the index and index is the minimum speed your car can go the minimum the minimum time so my index for my car is 11 40. so if my car has to go i if i go and i dial in you know i'm bracket racing and put the number on my windshield at a race it cannot be any slower than 1140 so i want my car to be able to go faster than 1140 otherwise it's really not competitive you've got to be able to go the number that you're going to be written on your windshield plus when you're qualifying uh to race like before before the actual eliminator before you know your your racing to stay in the race you have to um you have to qualify so everybody goes and races and like um say i go and i run a 10 eight so that puts me at six tenths underneath my index my index is eleven four and i go ten eight so it's six tenths under my index on any given day that would qualify me pretty much right in the middle of the pack so say there's some rich guy with a brand new coco camaro and his he's a double a stalker and his index is uh god no i can't remember doubly stocker indexes but so you call it 10 flat and then he runs a 9-0 that would mean he gets um he'd be one second under the index and then maybe he'd be the number one qualifier um so the the uh how part of your index affects where you qualify and then yes you got this big list of all the qualifiers and um that determines who races against who at a race so like the generally it'll be the the list will be the number one qualifier will go against the guy right at the top of the second half of the pack and then you know number two will go against number two number three right now against number three etc you know there's all kinds of little uh cheater guides where you can it tells you how to figure out you know who you're going to be up against and when you're qualifying they usually give you a couple of shots and uh people like jody lang here and i me i want to try to be like jody line which is always a good idea if you want to win races do what jody does you qualify slow because you can move up but you can't move down so if you qualify at a second under the index you can't then qualify six tenths under the index you're always it's always going to be your best time determines where you are on the qualifying sheet and so you when you have in mind who you might be up against then you can decide whether you want to go faster you can't go slower so you qualify slow and then you see what the list is doing you can tell who you're going to be up against and this is important because if you're like my car is a sea stalker i usually want to avoid other sea stalkers because most cars are faster than my old station wagon in c i mean my car is a fast car but when you put me on in the stock eliminator race and i'm up against other seat cars a lot of them are you know big block mustangs and camaros and combinations that are potentially more competitive than mine you know any given year my car can be pretty competitive but you know it's just i just want to avoid running against people who are going to be a heads up in class because you know two sea stalkers run against each other nobody writes on their window it's just whoever whoever gets to the finish line first and i want to avoid that so when i'm qualifying i i i like to leave something in my pocket you know qualify qualify slow and then see what's going on and i can go faster if i need to okay so stock eliminator picking the car is important getting the rules you're picking the combination like this car that i'm printing right now jody's car is typically powered by a 305 cubic inch chevy small block v8 which doesn't have the best of reputations no one ever says i'm going to street race my 305 chevy small block but that's not to say it doesn't have lots of potential if you know what you're doing which means if you work hard and spend your money on the right engine builder basically um you can really make a 305 fly especially when it comes you know it's how fast it goes is all relative to how fast nhra thinks it should go and so typically some super rich guy you know jody basically he uh he makes his bones by being a really good racer he's not like a huge money spender i mean he spends what he has to spend i'm assuming but there are people out there who just who you know go to their badass engine builder there's a few of them out there and say i don't care what cost i want to have the fastest 305 or 302 or 426 or whatever in the country and you know cost is no object and um so those guys are out there but in general you know like back to the intellectual thing we're uh we're trying to figure out the best combinations have at least talked about with the nhra if they decide that i'm going too fast with my car like if i qualify under if i qualify more than a second under my index that somebody in glendora you know where the nhra headquarters is they will say huh gaffo's going more than a second under the index all the time with his max wedge combination what should we do about this and usually what they'll do is they'll look at other combinations like mine around the country and say huh look at that well joe on the east coast is going under second on second under all the time too and um so they'll decide to throw some more horsepower on my on my combination and what that means like the uh the high compression max wedge combination that i typically run has 420 it's rated at 425 horsepower so if they up the horsepower if they say okay we're going to say you're worth 430 horsepower now instead of 425 that means that they will if they add if they add five horsepower well let's call 10 just to be simple 435 if they add 10 horsepower to my combination then that means my car has to weigh more because the way they determine how much your car weighs is the horsepower is multiplied times the factor of of your class so my my factor is 9 because i'm a c stalker if i was a stock it'd be 8.5 if i was d stock it'd be 9.5 so 9 is my factor for c so if they if they rate me at an extra 10 horsepower i have to add 9 times 10 90 pounds to my car and 90 pounds in general in any race car any drag car will make your car pretty much one-tenth slower so that's how they slow you down and basically that works i mean it it's it's nothing's perfect and you know like if you're the rich guy out there who says i want to have the fastest 305 in the country typically what you'll do is you'll figure out some way to put your car into bracket mode which means you're not going as fast as you possibly can because you know even as a rich guy you don't want to have like the nhra constantly throwing weight on your car i mean there's there's lots of examples in the history of stock eliminator where a combination has been run so fast so often that it's no longer competitive like if you want to put you know you your certain combinations would have to weigh like 5 500 pounds or some you know something you just couldn't do and um so that's another intellectual part of stock eliminator racing you can see you can you can run around at circles i mean it literally keeps people awake at night thinking about how how to do this kind of stuff so the thing i like the most about stock eliminator drag racing and not just drag racing sport in general the sport of stock eliminator racing compared to any other sport is that you get to meet the heroes of the sport and potentially kick their ass because they're going to be in the other lane like i have i don't the whole boasting thing drives me crazy and i'm just not going to do it but i will say i have competed against icons of the sport and beat them like at national events in front of 70 000 people you you go up against some guy who you've been reading about in the magazines for you since you're a little kid and holy i just beat that guy and there's no you know you can shake their hands and sign my dashboard you're the greatest better luck next time and uh you know there's just no substitute for that i mean what would you compare it to like you know you you couldn't do that in a football game you know you maybe you might be able to you know catch some old baseball player at a softball tournament or something like that maybe that's comparable but it's a it's a hoot and you know and not setting aside you know who you beat or don't be i just love being at national events and racing in front of thousands and thousands of people i mean i like racing at bracket races too don't get me wrong that is where i started and uh you can't be it keeps you sharp as a bracket as a stock eliminator racer to bracket race as much as you possibly can i mean there's a you know there's there's a lot of superheroes of of stock eliminator who are you're going to see them at their local track whenever they can racing and uh but there's not going to be 70 000 people in the seats there's not even going to be 70 000 seats if you're gonna go to a national event and raise stock eliminator it's if you race if you are successful enough to still be there on sunday they they put you in between all the john force eliminators you know all those badass uh top fuel dragsters and funny cars and all them they they run the final rounds of stock and super stock and super street and all that they're all they're all racing too so there's there's still butts in the stands and uh stock eliminator racing and super stock to a slightly lesser degree there's people that's all they're interested in they they come out to the races to watch that which is pretty cool and i you know i i watch those street outlaw type shows and you know i want to hate them i do but i get i get caught up in a little bit and i just wish you know and i think i'm going to be the guy to do this but maybe somebody out there watching will be able to do this i just wish that somebody could uh put the same attention into stock eliminator racing because you know when i race it i i've i've gotten to know a lot of people uh you know they've all got interesting stories and you know like you're making your combination work and there's you know there's lots of 69 camaros and new dodge challengers and you know super cobra jet mustangs and stuff but there's also a lot of like you know i got i got a friend who runs an amc pacer wagon and i know people who run four doors and of course you know i'm mike into steel so i know most of the guys out west at least who run station wagons and that's just it's just interesting like little personality thing so maybe somebody will make a show about nhra stock eliminator racing you know there used to be ihra stock eliminator racing too ihra's nhra's national hot rod association and ihra i guess is international hot rod association they're like a competing governing body and they they just got rid of of stock and super stock they just got tired of the rules and figuring it out and so no hopefully they won't do the same thing with nhra but you know you got to enjoy it while it's there so if you have a chance come on out and see some nhra stockton super stock racing it's it's fun and you know like most of the people in the in the class they like to talk about their combinations what they're doing you don't want to bug them when they're getting their game on or anything but you know the thing about drag racing is you can really get right up to the trailers and right up to the operations and see what's going on and you know meet the people and you know i highly recommend come on out and check it out sometime and if if you're in the northwest uh get in contact with wagons of steel and uh we'll we'll show you a good time well i guess that's it for this week can't think of anything else really to tell you about stock and super stock if you have any requests let me know next time i'm going to try and uh do a video about how wagons of steel makes the wagons and steel calendar which is a would be a real change of pace from this it's a do-it-yourself project and it'll be a it'll be an eye opener for everyone and you know since it doesn't seem to be making itself this year i guess i'm gonna have to get to work on it so i'll have something to show you next week with that in the meantime take care

Channel: Wagons of Steel

Views: 1,384

Rating: 4.8000002 out of 5

Keywords: Stock-Jody Lang, Intro video

Id: CfQrARu_r-c

Length: 35min 11sec (2111 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 12 2020