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Bill Creek believes in taking the
road less traveled. 42 years of age, and hailing from
Rockfield, Kentucky, Bill runs an 89 coupe, which you can see in
these pictures. He's been street racing as long as he can
remember, and started back in the heyday of musclecar
performance, with a Fairlane and a four-speed.
Bill bought this car in 1998, and
it takes a different approach to making power.
Something different about this car, which you don't see too
often, is the B&M 174 blower. The 174 is pullied to
make only 6 pounds of boost, which the car did at the recent
Dyno Day at Total Engine Airflow, in Bowling Green,
Kentucky. I had the luck to spend a few minutes talking to
Bill about his combo.
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Currently, the car wears the
aforementioned B&M 174 PowerCharger, which is a Roots Type
blower. For those of you who are not familiar with a Roots
blower, it uses two rotors, which mesh together, spun by a drive
belt, to force air into the intake, much like the blowers seen
on NHRA Top Fuel dragsters. This one is on a much smaller
scale, but produces the same effect. HORSEPOWER!
Also on tap is a set of stage 2 ported Total Engine Airflow
Twisted Wedge heads, the blower-specific intake needed to run
the PowerCharger, and a Comp Cams hydraulic roller camshaft of
undisclosed dimensions.
A throwback to Billy's street
racing days is the 4-speed Jerico transmission he uses to change
gears. If you've never been in the presence of one of
these, it's truly mind-boggling that something so choppy
actually helps win races. I stood next to Bill's car as he
wrung it out on the dyno, and each time he shifted gears, it
sounded like the transmission was going to fall out the bottom
of the car. But Bill swears by it! He says that as the car
makes power down the track, the tranny is actually very easy to
shift. I guess the way you need to shift on the dyno makes
it seems much worse than it really is. He uses a McLeod
clutch to push the power from the engine through the Jerico and
back to the 4.30:1 gears strapped into the Ford 8.8
differential.
Bill's also using an experimental
rear suspension. I spent a few minutes underneath the car
looking at it, and what's been done makes perfect sense.
The suspension has been designed by PT Performance, in Bill's
home state of Kentucky, and uses a set of adjustable upper arms,
combined with a relocation bracket, and a set of Southside lower
arms that have been flipped upside down. The relocation
brackets make the suspension act more like a true 4 link setup,
by repositioning the upper arm to actually point downward,
instead of straight as in the factory configuration. By
doing this, he's actually moving the instant center point of the
suspension somewhere closer to the middle of the car, instead of
ten feet in front of the car like the stock setup does.
This help the car to hook, and it does, as evidenced by the best
ET of 10.65 @ 131MPH. He's still tuning the suspension, to
find the sweet-spot, but you can guarantee when he does, it'll
be one heck of a ride!
By using the stock-type
suspension, it keeps Bill legal for NMRA Open Comp, and this
season, he plans to step up his racing program just a bit, and
compete in the Outlaw Street Car Association's True Street
class, as well as PRO's Open Comp class.
Best of luck to Bill this
season! We hope to see him at the races!
