Supercharged Gen 3 Hemi Cutlass Breaks Into the 7-Second Zone
In racing, as in life, it rarely goes as planned and often the unexpected difficulties, when met with perseverance, can lead to better than expected outcomes. This weekend we were helping Brian Bednar sort out his newly supercharged Gen 3 Hemi powered Olds Cutlass.
Brian Bednar and his buddy Jay, worked very hard over the last month to put a supercharged, electronically controlled G3 Hemi in place of a naturally aspirated, carbureted G3 Hemi. They did great work putting it in an unusual home, an early 80s G-body, in this case an Olds Cutlass.
Brian had campaigned the G3 powered family heirloom Cutlass very successfully in bracket racing and of late, in the 9.50 index class in the Modern Street Hemi series. Then he decided he wanted to go faster. Faster with about double the power in his stock, reinforced, factory GM rear suspension, no wheelie bar 3,200 ish lb G-body.
While we knew it would present some unique and different challenges, we didn’t expect the first one, we ran in to right out of the gate, a misbehaving, misscomunicating, new Holley Dominator. Because this is so rare (when we raced ourselves, we carried a spare but 10 years later, in was still in the trailer), it was hard to believe it really was the root of our first day problem, but after a thorough checkout, and some deep expert help trying to resurrect it, it was clear it was DOA.
The rest of this story would not of happened had it not been for DJ (the guy with the beautiful supercharged G3 ‘70 Cuda), offering us his spare Dominator. Jena and I made a quick run over and back to Bradenton and thanks to DJ, this morning, we were back in business. A gigantic THANK YOU to DJ !!!
With now only a few runs to sort it out, in his now pretty radically different Cutlass, he very quickly learned and adapted, and on his 3rd full pull, made its best ever run, a would have been, out the back door, 7 second pass in the 1/4 mile.
We might be outgunned in the Hemi Outlaw class tomorrow, but we have quite a bit left, even without smaller pulleys I intentionally left at home. Rest assured Brian will be ready to ride wheels up a good bit longer, and we intend to give him a tune up to make another of his G3 Hemi powered dreams come true. Stay tuned.
