So Race Week is Over...Whats Next for the LSXcalade? (Welcome to the Channel!)

So, we're back. Race week is over. My channel is honestly blown up all week and a lot of you watching this have probably never seen any of this before or know what I do outside of that event cuz you're new here. And if you are new here, I'm glad to have you and I'm about to explain uh what my future plans are for that thing and maybe give you a little backstory on it and just kind of fill you in on the blanks of what you might be curious about because you've just now found my channel and kind of might wonder what's going on. My main goal here with this channel is to provide entertainment with value. Like you should learn something when you watch my videos, no matter what that is. Like take something away from what I'm doing or saying and apply it to your own life to do something better than you have been doing it. That's my main goal here. That's what I want to see you doing and I just think that's the coolest thing ever because I've inadvertently found a platform to speak from to a lot of people just by doing what I like to do. And I feel it's my obligation to do something useful with it because people get up on these pedestals and they think that they're all that and they don't care about anyone else. They just show you what they're doing because they like the numbers and makes them feel good and all this stuff and I think that's BS, honestly. Like there is no this without you watching it. So, why don't you get something, too? That's what I'm about. As far as the Escalade goes, it survived the week, which is awesome. I did it on the same four tires. I never changed my tires. The only problem I had all week was before I even ran, I noticed a uh cracked brake rotor. So, I fixed that real quick on day one and on the last day, my exhaust fell off, which is, you know, whatever. I don't really think that's counts as a problem. It's just something stupid. I fixed it in the pits, but I never I never had even pull out the toolbox besides that. Like all I did was pull out my 3/4 wrench, tighten down the chains in the front before I make a pass and just let it roll. One and done. After turning it up on the last day and knocking out that 950 and the 940, it was spinning both times, I see the writing on the wall that this thing could run an eight really easily and we're going to do it. My plan is to get this thing ready to run eight-second passes at FL2K. That's the goal. To do that, I need to make new downpipes out of thicker aluminum cuz that one's messed up. I got to check everything. I got some weird oil leak out one of the head bolts on the on the valley. Like every day before I make a pass, I have to like stick a paper towel in there, like absorb it. It's the weirdest thing. Like I'll show you. It had been like this for a while. Like I noticed it driving around cuz before race week, I daily drove this thing for like a week just to kind of like feel out, see what it was going to do. It's It's really weird. Like when it when it gets warm, I'll get like see down in there? There's like this little oil puddle. I think uh I've had like a perpetual oil leak on this thing forever and I couldn't I could never figure out where it was coming from and I think that's it cuz I think it builds up there and then runs down the the valley cover between the head and the valley cover and then drips down off the block. It doesn't actually drip like on the ground, but just like the bottom of the pan and like it's all just kind of soggy under there and I could never figure out why. So, I'm going to fix that, which may require the heads to come off, which won't be the worst thing ever cuz I haven't touched this motor in two years, which is crazy. Like the driver side header and valve cover, I have not touched the bolts in two years. That that's how awesome this setup has been. It's pretty much just been a year of working out transmission issues, which once I made the switch from Rossler to Extreme Automatics, that changed the game completely. Lonnie at Extreme Automatics is like the 4L80 wizard. Like Carl Rossler couldn't figure out how to get a 4L80 to hold 1,100 horsepower in this thing for more than like five wide open pulls. It was freaking ridiculous. And I actually called Extreme Automatics after Rossler told me to get bent, he couldn't figure it out. Meanwhile, he told me that it would hold 2,000 horsepower, no prob no problem when I bought it. And it didn't even hold 1,100 for freaking five runs. Stupidest thing ever. So, I wasn't going to buy a 400 from him, which is what he told me I needed. So, I called Extreme Automatics and Lonnie picks up the phone and I'm like, "Yeah, I'm going to get a quote on a 400." He's like, "Oh, what's it in?" You know, blah blah blah. I was like, "Yeah, I got this 4L80. It's not holding up." He's like, "Who built it?" Rossler. "Well, well, what's happening to it?" And I explained it to him, you know, how like the direct clutches were burning up, it would mess up the converter and the rear planetary gears would melt. He's like, "Oh, dude, that's a really common problem. Like I'll tell you right now, like not a lot of people have this figured out, but it's the valve body thing." And he's like, "You don't need a 400. Let me fix the 80." And I was like, "Are you sure? Uh okay." And I trusted him because he could have made more money selling me a 400. That's what I came there asking for and he told me I didn't need it. He did not sell me what I was asking for. Instead, I spent less money with him to have him redo this one the correct way and it worked. So, for that, I'm eternally grateful for Lonnie at Extreme Automatics and if you have a 4L80 that you want built for anything that holds a good amount of power, like he sells his valve body separately, so you can like put it on yourself or you can build the whole transmission. I I paid for that stuff. He didn't give it to me for free. This plug is an honest plug because he made my life easier. It changed the game for this thing from the day I put it in there. I messed up the direct clutches once from uh just abuse and we turned up the line pressure cuz it didn't have enough pressure and it held so well that it actually broke the gears after that. Like it broke the planetary gears, which doesn't really happen that much. So, from there, we uh redid it with billet like straight-cut pro mod planetaries from a 400 and then he had like Frankenstein the center section to have a 400 center section, like this thing's basically a turbo 400 stuffed into a 4L80 case. The only thing original on it left is the case and the pump. That's it. So, this thing is a freaking unit. And that's how it's been since then. That's how it's living and we just hit it with 27 lbs peak, 24 down the track on those last two passes. Like whenever it spun, it ramped up to 27 and then down the track it made 24, which is 1,400, 1,500 wheel, I think, at 24 lbs. I can't remember, but yeah, so do all that, check the motor out, make sure it's good. Like And when I say I haven't touched it in two years, I have not touched it in two years. Like I haven't retorqued the head studs, I haven't touched the rockers, nothing. Nothing. All I have done is put oil in it. Like so it it could use a little bit of uh checking up just to make sure it's all good. Um I got to go over like my steering components, make sure those are okay. I put tie rod sleeves on it back in like February and they helped a ton. The spun tubular control arms back then, too, cuz my stock ones were literally like breaking the factory rubber bushings from the launch. It was pretty crazy. I mean, aside from that stuff, there's really not a whole lot this thing needs to to run eights. Besides one thing that'll help a lot is a transfer case shifter because right now, I do not have a way to shift the transfer case from inside the truck. I have to lay on the ground and put my hand up in there and then push the lever forward to put it in four high before I make a pass and I can't do a burnout like that. I mean, I probably could, but you may not know this. It's not good to do a four-wheel drive burnout. It's like really hard on all that stuff. So, what you're supposed to do is put it in two-wheel drive, get your back tires sticky and then put it in four high and launch because the way this works with the 4x4 locked in, it's a it's an even split, no matter what's going on. So, if the back tires are sticky, even if the front ones start to want to spin, the back is still going to propel the truck forward and the front ones will eventually catch up from momentum because with the factory transfer case in this thing, once the front tire would start to spin, all the power would just go to that tire, which is why I went to a manual 4x4 setup and that's the way to go for racing. I don't care what anybody says because if you spin the front tires, the back ones are going to keep pushing. That's why it's like that. So, I need to be able to do a burnout, get the back tires sticky. That way when I launch, they're continuing to go because during both of those passes where I turned it up, the first pass, it just straight up knocked the tires off. I pedaled it and it still went 950. And the second one, I felt it start to haze. Like I felt I felt it start to skate. So, when it started to skate, I hit second early to like catch it up and it did. It It could still skate. Like you can see in the video that there's like lines coming out of the back tires that are not in the same path as the front, which is pretty freaking wild to think that this thing was skating past the 60-ft mark, but that's how it was. So, if I get the back tires sticky, it won't do that anymore because I can actually launch hard. And it really doesn't need any more power to run eights. It just needs to launch better and not do that cuz that was a 155 and a 157 60-ft which are not even this thing's best. I never really tried, but it's still been a 148. So, put it all together, this is an 8-second machine all day. And now, after seeing that, I have faith that this drivetrain will hold what I want to throw at it because ooh, when it when it lit up to 27 lbs, I was like, "Oh my god." Cuz the the most my butt dyno has ever felt in this thing was like 21. And that was an insane difference. To put that in a perspective, it makes literally almost on the dot 40 hp per pound of boost. And it was still making 40 per pound of boost at the 27 PSI mark. This thing is a freaking monster and I can't wait to just let it do its thing because honestly, it's been a heck of a journey between all the drive like the transmission issues and just like the last year has been a learning curve. But we finished race week 1,200 mi on the street, 9-second average and we end the week and the week knocking off a 950 and a 940 at 150 mph or like 120 and 121 to the eighth spinning. Man, can't ask for much more than that. You may wonder why did I pick this thing to make a race car out of? Well, it was my daily driver. Uh my dad actually bought it to be his work vehicle and then kind of like never used it. So, I started messing with it cuz I was like, "Well, if he's not going to use it, he's never going to know if I mod it." Cuz I wasn't allowed to mod it. And that was kind of like how that was supposed to work was he had a car that he drove and he would just use this whenever he needed to go on like business trips and carry his leak detectors cuz he he sells like industrial uh vacuum equipment for like semiconductor manufacturing and stuff like that. So, he's had a Suburban my entire life, literally. When I was born, he had a '95 Suburban and I loved that thing. I was like obsessed with it. And whenever he sold it, I like freaking I was crying about it and I hated it and then he got a a 2003 Yukon XL uh red one, barn doors. And my uncle still actually has that one and he just got a new one. He's supposed to give it to me. So, I may actually build the old Yukon that I rode around in when I was little, which would be really awesome, but we'll come back to that later. After when he sold that one to my uncle, he got a 2008 Suburban uh a white one and that eventually became like my pseudo first car. Um whenever I got my driver's license, I drove that to school and you know, I like unbolted the flex pipe like a little jackass and made all kinds of noise. I blew up a couple 4L60s and I actually uh I went to put a Corvette servo in it and I didn't um I just thought you could take it off and put it in and it'd be fine. So, I just slid under there and went to do that while he was out of town, of course, cuz I didn't tell him about anything. Otherwise, I wouldn't have been allowed to do it. And I popped it off and it started leaking fluid like on me. I'm like, "Oh crap, I wasn't ready for this." So, I put it back on and I was like, "I'll do it later. I'll do it later." Well, when I put it back on, I don't think I got the snap ring seated the whole way and a couple days later, I was driving around and it popped out and the transmission blew up. And this was like, I don't know, a month and a half after it just got rebuilt from the first time I blew it up. And uh uh I I told my dad I didn't know why it happened. I If he watches this video, this will be the first time he found out that it was actually my fault. He probably knew, but just never really grilled me on it. Cuz when they took it back to the dealership, uh they were like, "Well, this thing popped out of the side. That's probably why it blew up." And my dad was like, "You know anything about that?" I'm like, "I don't know. I don't know. I think they you know, when they rebuilt it, then maybe they didn't get it in the whole way. Like it just started slipping for no reason. I I couldn't tell you why." But uh yeah, that's why. It's my fault. I've been a Suburban guy from day one. I've always loved these things and you every time, you know, you sit there in my comments tell me, "You put that in a Fox body. You should put that in an S10. You put it in something lighter and go faster." You know, you totally missed the point, totally. I don't care. You don't think I know that already? You don't think I know that that setup could go sixes in like a chassis car like a really light Fox body? Cuz it absolutely could. That's not the point. The point is to take this and make it fast because I like it. And the whole trend with drag racing, this is some key information right here. So, take notes. The interest level of drag racing is completely dependent over time of how much difficulty you can throw into something and still make it fast. Like like for example, you go back to like the '70s with like the rail dragsters and stuff. That was like all cool. And then, you know, you start making real cars fast. So, you got like real body cars going fast and that's cool. Okay, well, then that gets kind of boring. So, let's take these real cars and put them on the street. And then, you got things like Drag Week coming up where that's real popular because you can take your car, still go fast, and drive it on the street. Okay, well, then queue Street Outlaws. Okay, you get your real car, you can drive it on the street. Well, now you got to race it on the street where it's not sticky. So, we're going to add that level of difficulty, too. It's just what can you throw in there to turn up the difficulty and still go fast because fast is relative. None of these street car things can hold a candle to like an actual dragster, but no one cares because it's under this like circumstance of rules and expectations to go a certain amount of speed. So, in the future, I'm calling this right now, the future is going to be trucks, SUVs, useful stuff. How fast can you go with that? Because it follows the trend of how much crap you can throw into something and still make it fast while overcoming more difficulty because people naturally like watching people overcome difficulties. Another thing to note is that just look at the cars on the road. Back in the '70s and '80s, everybody drove a car, like a real car. Now, go out on the road, everything is trucks, SUVs, crossovers. People don't just bop around in sedans anymore like they used to. It's a different world. So, the racing world is kind of behind the pedestrian world because the pedestrian world is where the future race cars come from. So, all the people all the old race car people have now or or they were like regular cars back in the '70s. Like, you know, cars that weren't cool back then are cool now just because they're old. So, as time moves on, there's more and more trucks out there, more and more people are going to be making trucks, racing trucks, doing fun stuff with their trucks. And I'm telling you that right now, you can come back to this video years from now and be like, "That guy had it figured out." Because I just know that's where it's going. And you if you want to build a truck, I think now's the best time to do it because that interest level is only going to keep going up. And that's a pro tip. You can have that one for free. If you see my other videos, if you haven't, you should go watch them. There's a lot of backstory and all this other stuff. I got like a 30-minute video explaining like in detail of how this thing kind of came to be. And you know, hit that subscribe button, turn the little bell thingy on so you know when I post stuff. Like make a comment. If you have a legitimate observation about what I could be doing better or do more of or do less of, like let me know. I want to know about it. I want to do the best I can.