Let’s not sugarcoat how things were after the last Angry Grandpa update: after parts-bombing our Chrysler 300C with a healthy amount of go-fast goodies, the first trip out to the track proved to be f**king infuriating. The car barely bettered it’s best time stock (like, maybe a hundredth or two better), wouldn’t run a sixty foot time worth mentioning, and wasn’t making any improvements whatsoever. In fact, the only thing that it did do nicely that day at Beech Bend was haze the tires into oblivion. Fun, but that doesn’t equal fast. I wanted answers, and so did Erik at BFNY. Something just wasn’t adding up.

And it didn’t help that I got to hear it from the peanut gallery, either:

“Want to easily get it into the 12’s? put a LS1 into it. LOL”. Ok, I’ve seen a couple of LSx-swapped late-model Mopars, even a couple that run hard, but that’s them. Not happening here.

“I knew this whole deal was a waste. Stock parts for other used stock parts. A teeny tiny shot of nitrous is the answer. The gas money would have paid for the kit.” I won’t own a bottle baby. I won’t put it on the car. That’s just a flat no. If you’ve got to resort to the bottle just to break into the twelves with a V8 that was made after 1998, you aren’t trying hard enough. And it wasn’t just “stock parts for stock parts”. These were well planned-out upgrades. It’s not like a 5.7 cam was swapped for another 5.7 cam.

But that’s alright. I said I wasn’t giving up on this deal. Just before I left for SEMA, I dug out an old laptop I’ve had since the last time I was in Iraq. I sent it to a computer repair specialist to have the screen fixed. Why? So that I could install the software that comes with the Trinity tuner…mainly so I could log runs, download the data and ship it to Erik so that he could review what the hell happened at Beech Bend. I had two logged runs, so once I got back from Las Vegas, Erik got the data. And he didn’t like what he saw one bit.

Particularly the part about where the torque converter flashed at 2,200 RPM instead of 3,200 RPM. Problem #1: the wrong torque converter was installed. The converter that was installed was indeed supposed to be a 3,200 RPM unit. But the guy who had turned in the converter as a trade-in core had been lied to by his previous trans builder, who had swapped in a stock SRT-8 unit instead of the new converter like what had been ordered. So Grandpa did get a converter upgrade, just 1,000 RPM shy of the intended target.

Another issue involved the fuel and spark mapping. Grandpa had been tuned fairly lean, and the spark mapping was all over the place. With time running down for the trip to New Jersey, Erik shipped out a tune to try out for a quick log. I went out and logged a run…on some quiet backroad surrounded by fields. The results looked promising, so with the new revision installed, I packed up the car, convinced the wife to come with, and made the 12-hour trek to Voorhees, New Jersey in one day.

The final event of the Modern Street Hemi Shootout series promised low temperatures and density altitudes, and it delivered. Nicely. Straight out of the box, the Chrysler punched a [email protected] on an absolutely garbage run. The car spun off the line, tried to fishtail and wasn’t happy with manual shifting. Yet it still ran a personal best, and shut down the first goal for the car: a 13.xx run at over 100 MPH. And we hadn’t even began to have fun yet.

I’ll spare most of the day because it truly became “run time trial, check tuner, make new revision, load tune, try again”. But here’s the bottom line:

Damn near a second better than it’s Beech Bend test and tune, and well over a second better than prior to the BFNY build. If the car and I hadn’t had an argument on my final run over which gear to start out in (the car won the argument and picked 2nd gear) I may have scratched precariously close to the 12-second mark. Erik is going to make good on getting the right converter into the car. There’s still a couple more things in the pipeline. And there might even be one more test and tune at Beech Bend yet, though I am not promising anything there. Because, honestly, I’m over the moon today. I had the radio on listening to the announcer on the 13.16 run and I started screaming as if I won the freaking lottery.

You can make your guesses as to what the car will run once the right converter is in place. But for now, I’m content knowing that the big gold brick has met and exceeded both the 13-100 goal and has surpassed my previous personal best by a large margin. And the kicker on all of this is that after I was done, after I put the backseat back in and loaded the car up, I drove to a gas station, topped off the tank, and cruised around like I’ve always done since the day I took the Chrysler home.