Around the Shop
Jaguar XJR-5 Chassis 001
Jim owns this Jaguar XJR-5 001 GTP with Bill Karges and Tom Minnich. The engine arrived last Wednesday from Ed Pink Racing Engines.
It’s a 6 liter V-12 Jaguar with 6 Weber carburetors. The chassis is a XJR-5 001 the first XJR-5 built.
Once the engine is installed we will probably do a shake down run with the car at Willow Springs!
You can see video of our last Willow Springs test run, with this car’s sister chassis owned by Rick Knoop, HERE
Cars of Bonneville… Part 3
Jim and the Busby A Team will be headed out to Bonneville Salt Flats again, during the October speedweek… They are re-building the engine after Fireball Boyle’s big day out, and it is going to be better than ever! shooting for 180mph+!
Keep scrolling down, I did a couple more posts on Cars of Bonneville last week… And keep coming back! We will have great stuff this week, including some really cool photos we found while in Monterey while visiting Jim’s close friend and race sponsor/ manager Bill Karges…
Len Jones and his son Len Jones Jr (above) showed up to check on the car… I loved that motorcycle he rolled up on! Turns out they were in impound! That had broken a record just before we showed…
They broke the long standing Push Rod Production record with a speed of 116.25; this record had been formerly set by a team of Harley Davidson Engineers, so the Lenny’s were pretty stoked about it.
Nice work.
David Busby and his team with their Lake City Ford Fusion, after having won their second consecutive weekend at Irwindale Raceway!! Go David!
Big Thanks to Tom Addis at Lake City Ford, and Tim Huddelstone!
Just a quick view of Jim Busby heading out of the starting after being pushed by the ‘32 Sedan…. I will have a much more developed Bonneville video soon, it just is taking some time.
For now, enjoy this tasty little bit. It is pretty cool to see that shiny black beauty streaking down the pure white salt.
We Make it to Impound!
When your car breaks a world record it is sent to Impound.
This means you have to leave your car under SCTA (Southern California Timing Association)’s monitoring overnight.
The next morning you can return, get your car out of impound and back up your record… You have to break the record twice, then your times are averaged out and that becomes the world record.
Impound consisted of some truly ominous thunder clouds rolling in, so we cleaned and covered up the car and got out of there. Hope it doesn’t rain out the track!
Day 1- Tech/ Not so good of a run…
Spirits were high as we arrived at the salt flats and pulled the 792 car out of the trailer.
Then, we headed to Bonneville Tech, for a major safety inspection. Bonneville’s first priority is safety.
We could not wait and see how the car ran with all the new changes done to it.
Unfortunately, despite the Busby A Team’s painstaking preparation of the car, 792 was not firing on all cylinders.
The Busby A Team began the long troubleshooting process and came up with some solid theories about why it was not working well… They got a lot of work done that day, but we had to get out of there, as people are not allowed to stay on the salt too late in the night.
Bonneville… I am hooked.
After an amazing weekend seeing some truly priceless cars in Pebble Beach, it was nice to take off the neck tie and slip into a genuine Munz- Busby 792 Bonneville Car T-shirt, and get down and dirty in Bonneville.
We left the Mercedes by the side of the road and hopped into the Rat Rod with Jim Stepan and hit the salt!
Richard Munz’s grandson Joe showed up while we were waiting in line for our first run and it was one one heck of a day.
The salt is a very special place, and the people there are awesome. We will be having much more on this shortly… much much more. Come back, it is really hard to take a bad picture in this place.
Don Prudhomme at the Quail
We had the great pleasure to spend time with the legendary Don Prudhomme. For those of you who do not know who he is; He is the greatest drag racer of all time.
Most of all he is a really genuine and nice guy, not to mention his wife Lynn and daughter Donna are awesome too!
This is his really cool truck he has been putting together over the years… He drove it all the way from San Diego to Carmel Valley and back!
The Quail…
I should really be onto a lot more stuff, considering we just had an awesome out on the salt today. They only problem is the Internet is flaky to say the least… Luckily I got these pictures up last night after a late drive, thinking I could post them on my phone… Nope.
Tomorrow the Interenet will be mastered in the little town near Bonneville Salt Flats… Stay tuned!! Some really great photos are coming right up!
Great Day at the Quail on Friday with Richard Munz and his fresh Kurtis Aguila 500. Some interesting things happened, including the center scaffolding holding up the Quail’s logo on stage tipped over smashing the fender and hood of the winning car as the owner was recieving his champagne and award! Awesome. Glad I am not the guy who set up that scaffold. This whole week will be jammed with great stuff from the weekend. We are almost to Bonneville! Can’t wait to see it for the first time!
This is the engine that has broken world records developed by the Busby A Team’s very own David and Jim Busby.
It is an Ardun, but they have pushed it to the limits.
Here are all the cool trophies you get every time you break a record.
This is also the car that David Busby became a member of the 200 mph club in! Can’t wait to see it in action in two weeks!
Around the Shop
As we are getting the Bonneville car ready, and we start talking about it, so many great stories come out…
I dug up these pictures on Jim’s computer of Van and Kathy. They run a upholstery shop a few doors down from the Busby Shop and do all of the upholstery needed on the cars. They do amazing work…
However, they are also heavily involved with Bonneville. Kathy rides the motorcycle up top, and has gone well over 200mph on that thing!! We will be hanging with the a lot come Bonneville Speedweek! Can’t wait!
It is sometimes just really nice to step into this room when the shop is in full tilt in the other rooms and feel the quiet. It is a different kind of quiet, the calm before the storm of sorts… It is an amazing feeling.
It is a result not only of the amazing cars in there now, but the countless that have passed through and will be in there soon, keep it up JB.
Hanging right above the Kurtis 500, is this picture of Phil Hill… A long time friend of Jim’s.
I just look at it and imagine how cool it must have felt to be zipping along in that Ferarri with nothing but a fresh polo shirt, goggles and a helmet on.
