[ponyakr]

I forgot one incident that was interesting. At the track where we'd won the first 2 races, the Bird started missing real bad, so we lost the round. We decided to just load it up and watch the rest of the race. Then we heard over the loud speaker that they had classed a car wrong and were going to run the whole thing over. And when they got the field lined up they'd call us up. Well, we went to work. I jerked the intake and valley pan off and there was the problem. A lifter had come apart. I didn't have a spare, but all the parts were still lying there so I just put it back together and stuck it back in the hole, adjusted the rocker arm and buttoned everything back up. And just in the nick of time, they were calling us to the staging lanes. So TJ jumped back in, backed it off the trailer and headed to the lanes. Well, I reckon that was the only problem. It ran great and chalked up another victory. We never had anything like that happen again. If you lose you load it up and go home. But it actually did happen once. That reminds me, in case you run hydraulic lifters, never run the kind with a flimsy wire clip retainer. This incident points this out. Make sure you use the lifters with real snap ring retainers. After this incident we always bought Rhodes. There are probably other good brands also.