Last-minute mechanical work

In the last five months, I've been preparing the car for One Lap. Since we're competing on a different size of tire than my previous setup, I opted to order a new pair of Forgestar wheels from Howey Industries. They're the same design (CF5), size (18" x 12") and offset as the rear wheels I ran before with 335/30-18 tires, but for One Lap we'll run 315/30-18s on 12"-wide wheels all around. The tires are a little stretched, but after testing at High Plains Raceway, this setup seemed pretty decent, even with having realigned the car to reduce the negative camber... this in the hopes of not cording our tires from all the highway miles before One Lap is over.

I've also done some preventative maintenance, such as replacing the clutch master; replacing the transaxle mounts; and replacing the front Stoptech brake rotor rings and rebuilding the STR-60 brake calipers with fresh pressure seals and dust boots. Of course the car got fresh brake pads (Stoptech SR34 track compound) and an oil change too (Red Line synthetic 40-weight race oil, 3 one-gallon jugs of it... the car takes 10 1/2 quarts).

But very late in the game, I got concerned about whether my rockers—or more accurately, my rocker arm trunnion bearings—would hold up. Apparently the OEM needle bearings for the rocker trunnions can fail and them jam up elsewhere inside the engine. So I opted to replace the factory rockers' bearings with a set of bushing design replacement from Straub Technologies.

With rush shipping, they arrived on Thursday last week, and I had them swapped in by Friday night (the car is scheduled to go to SCR Performance in Loveland for transport drop-off the following Saturday). Having only worked on import 4-cylinder engines before, I was pleasantly surprised to learn how easy it is to remove the valve covers on a LS7 V8. And I was surprised to read "made in Mexico" stamped on the bottom of the valve cover...

And here's me, working meticulously to replace the rockers arm assemblies without making a rookie mistake somehow (it's a really, really straightforward and easy job):

The car seems to run just fine after the parts swap. Which is good.

Not much to look at with the "after" pic, but you can tell the OEM rockers have been swapped out by the fixing bolts... the OEM bolts were 8mm hex head, whereas the replacement bolts the Straub bushing rockers came with are metric Allen bolts.

Next up: vinyl application and vanity shots.