Project Six Pack - All For One And One For All

Editor's Note: Project Six Pack was one of the most famous cars of the '70s, covered in-depth during the early part of that decade in the now-defunct Super Stock & Drag Illustrated magazine on the Stock Eliminator trail. Now 30 years in the making, we are happy to bring you this update as the car returns to bracket competition in the Colorado Rockies. Former readers of HPM have followed some of the other changes made to the car in the last few years.

Most magazine project cars, despite good intentions, tend to be rather short-lived. The '69 M-code Road Runner seen here is the exception. This project first appeared in Super Stock and Drag Illustrated Magazine in the February '70 issue for a lace-painting feature, and officially became Project Six Pack in April 1972. Back in the early to mid-'70s, owner and SS&DI field editor Ted Struse, along with partners Mike Smith and Terry Welsh, campaigned the car in Stock Eliminator, setting six NHRA national records in the process. Now restored and sporting a 15:1 McCandless Performance low-deck 451-inch stroker and some nine-second time slips, the car would be perfect for nostalgia racing. Trouble is, there is absolutely nothing in the Denver area but brackets.

In his mid-'50s and forced to contend with Parkinson's disease, Ted had to rule out traveling to other parts of the country to compete in nostalgia meets, and he even considered putting the car back into street trim. Because of the car's racing heritage and the fact it runs so well in its current configuration, all agreed it would be a shame to take it apart and start over without further exploring its potential.

In that light, a phone call was made to transmission guru Frank Lupo, owner of Dynamic Converters in Delaware, to ascertain if the converter stall speed could be optimized to better-utilize the higher rpm power band of the Indy-McCandless 451 Wedge. While the car had the power, it didn't seem to come off the line like it should.

This is a prime example of why high-altitude racing is a challenge. The converter Frank originally built was rated at 6,000 rpm, and at sea level, that's pretty much what you'd get. But at Bandimere's often 8,000-foot plus effective elevation, a 4,800-rpm flash speed is about the limit for this unit. Nonetheless, the car left the line cleanly, with no trace of bog or stumble, and at an uncorrected 10.76 e.t. (which equates to a 9.98 at sea level), lack of power was certainly not the problem. We've seen legal NHRA stockers at Bandimere that run over a second slower yet can pull the wheels off the ground. Some of this may be due to the shifting of weight allowed by NHRA rules, something that has not been done to this car, but the bottom line is that the car was just not in the power band off the line.

As luck would have it, East Coast Max Wedge campaigner Joe Aluise, the first NHRA Stock Eliminator record-holder in the nines, made a visit to Denver to do some high-altitude running a while back, and collected quite a bit of data while he was here. Since we knew the Aluise crew also used Dynamic converters, we asked if they would be willing to help us out with some concrete figures on how converter performance varied from sea level to Bandimere. They knew of Project Six Pack and were more than happy to help.

The new unit that resulted from this meeting of the minds has a nominal stall-speed rating of 6,700 rpm. The general rule of thumb is that stall speed should be approximately 1,500 rpm less than your shift point. Running at sea level, this would be too much for our combination, which is shifted at 7,200-7,500 rpm. But at Bandimere's elevation, Joe Aluise's data showed that we could expect to lose approximately 1,000 to 1,200 rpm in stall speed. While that seems like a lot, our initial testing showed an even higher 1,400 to 1,500 actual rpm loss! In other words, our 6700-rpm converter became a "5,200" at our mile-high elevation.