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My friend's RED got front-halved, on the track!

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ricardo1967:
I good friend was racing his RED this weekend at Brown County Dragway (Bean Blossom, IN), business as usual. He does his 128 MPH / 5.99 sec pass (throttle stop) and goes for another round. Then right after the burnout, he hears a loud bang and the rest is history, both front lower rails cracked open!

Car bio: '97 Spitzer Dragster, alky injected 477 BBC

What do you guys think? Repairable? Slip a pipe inside and weld it together? Does it need to be front-halved? Spitzer estimated $2k+ to front-half it...

BCD is not the smoothest track, but I wonder if this is a trailer-induced fatigue crack. Although his roundtrip to the track is only 42 miles.

wideopen231:
I would sleave it inside rosebud weld bothe sides then weld it up and be good to go

BK:
And block it up when your towing.

rooman:
Been there, done that!   Although my customer broke the uprights out and not the frame rails themselves. He only raced locally (longest trip was to Terre Haute) but not supporting the car in the trailer is definitely the issue. Cars take much more of a beating in the trailer than they do on the track.  Besides supporting the car it is also a good idea to tie it down so that it can't bounce up off the support and then crash down.
  Sleeves and rosette welds will fix it but he will have to cut the top rails as well and split the car to get a reasonable length sleeve into the lower rails. He may also have to go into the rail at the upright with a drum sander to clean up the inside diameter depending on the quality of the weld where the upright lands.
    It is possible to put a sleeve in the lower without cutting the car in two but it involves some more work. The trick is to slot the rail on one side of the split and put a hole in the sleeve so that you can use a pin punch to slide the sleeve into the rail, line up the other half and then slide the sleeve back so that it is centered. In this case I would put the slot in the front half, under the upright. I replaced the top rails in the engine bay of Gary Densham's funny car a few years back using this method and it worked out great. When I talked to Steve Plueger about it later (he built the car) he said that it was how he did it too.

Roo

dreracecar:
Very common breakage area for frames of that design,  Slice and tap back weld and add some rosetts.
Question, cant see the front clearly, but is the lower frame rail end exposed in the front? If it is or the cap can be removed easy, Go from there to tap the sleeve back once incerted into the broken end, then you wont have to deal with slicing the rail. Generally around a $200 or less fix

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