The car coasted to a stop at the 500 foot mark with Ken Thomas' car bouncing to a stop 100 behind us. I ran out to the 200 foot mark knowing something wasn't right. My brother backed up, jumped the car into first gear, and staged with the trans brake. Tony ran a 115 mile an hour car with no brakes to a win, then stopped the car using 1700 feet of shutdown area and then some. He finally told us of the problem after he got back to the pits, so my dad had to work on getting some brakes before the next round.
Experts say everything has to be precise to the thousandth for modern Super Pro cars to run right.
We found out one night what being off by five hundredths can do to the car. The cause was that the shortened driveshaft was out of round by five hundredths of an inch. The effect was a bent up floorboard, and a transmission case that was gone except where the transmission bolted onto the block. The innards of the transmission were hanging visually from the bottom of the car. We took the transmission remains back to Dave's, where they reassembled the leftovers for a ridiculously low price.