In the past two issues, High Performance Pontiac brought you the dramatic drag-racing action from our Pavement Pounders Shootout in Norwalk, Ohio. The event was held the day before the Ames Performance Tri-Power Pontiac Nationals and brought together a specially selected group of racers for the mission of a lifetime—to make their best quarter-mile passes ever and then make them even better with tuning and technique.
For Part III, we feature two more classic Pontiacs that attended our event. Both started life as retail cars in the '60s but they have been transformed into strip-only scorchers.
Jeff Karakul of Brunswick Hills, Ohio, has made a career of helping people keep things together, but on the track, he lets loose with his '65 GTO, which features a 455/462 with Edelbrock heads, a Turbo 400, and 4.10 gears.
Ryan Wiersema of Morrison, Illinois, is a project engineer for a plastic injection and molding company. More importantly to Pontiac fans, he's the grandson of one of Pontiac's greatest racers, Arnie Beswick. Ryan's Firebird, which he bought from Grandpa Arnie, features a Pontiac 455/462 block, Edelbrock heads, a Turbo 400, and 3.89 gears.
Weather Report
The temperature at Summit Motorsports Park during our Shootout ranged from 78.5 to 88.2 degrees. Barometric pressure was measured at 29.74 hg and the dew point was 72.6 degrees. The track is 853 feet above sea level, and density altitude ranged from 2,424 to 3,245 feet, so we give each racer his own correction factor based upon the density altitude at the time of his best pass.
Jeff's best pass occurred at 3:10 p.m. with a density altitude of 3,092 feet, so he receives an altitude-correction factor of 0.9588 for e.t. and 1.0437 for mph. Ryan's best pass occurred at 12:45 p.m. with a density altitude of 3,245 feet, so he receives an altitude-correction factor of 0.9614 for e.t. and 1.0499 for mph. The correction factors are designed to chart the theoretical best performance at sea level, and will be done on the best pass only based on e.t.