Hey, I was the same way footbraking this weekend. Mine will go to about 2200, and I have a TCI 3000 stall converter, nothing fancy. The throttle is just "twitchy" on these cars.
A tune that tightens up the shifts, and gears and converter will make a big difference for you. I'd go 4,000 on the converter if this is a max effort car. Gears 4.10 or even 4.30s. Use one of those rpm calculators to see where your rpms would be. 28" rear tire.
A tune might make it a little snappier throttle wise, but the throttle on these cars is weird. That big gap in the pedal/throttle before it kicks in. I made a little bracket and adjuster that I use to set the pedal lower, it basically is a an adjusting screw that I turn and pushes right on the pedal arm and so that the "slack" is taken out. It's easy to make something like that as the whole pedal mechanism just come right out of the car really easily.I can't totally get the "slack" out but it is way better.
Man, with what you are running now, you might be able to get in the 7s with the right tune, converter, and gears, and a nice cool Fall night, and dropping that 90 extra pounds you have to work with.
What sorts of rules are there on things like driveshafts? Do you have the stock one? Those way like 39 pounds and an alum one ways like 18. Can you drop the front sway bar? I have a sway bar delete/radiator support on my car. That's like 18 pounds or so, I think. Do you have light wheels? If not, wheels, radiator support and DS would get you pretty close to that minimum weight.
Interesting idea on the throttle pedal deal.
I now have an electric water pump and a manual control over the low speed side of the fan, so I can run as cool as possible...if I wanted to.
I'll get to experiment tomorrow with different temps while in the staging beams.
I'll try 120, 130, 140 in the beams, then 150.
Gotta help more than 190 degrees...lol
Last weekend I jammed the t-stat open with a couple of stainless steel bolts.
First I was going to delete the t-stat until I saw that it needed to be there to provide a place for the o-ring seal to sit.
So I jammed it open and then blocked off the bypass line coming from the driver's side of the intake down to the t-stat housing.
Problem solved
Now 98% of all the water is forced to exit the engine on the passenger side of the intake, go thru the radiator, and back into the block near the oil filter.
With the car off, the water temp went from 190 to 140 in 7 minutes with the fan on low.
We are not allowed to run an aluminum driveshaft because the car never came from the factory with aluminum. So it's steel only.
Only 2 companies I know of make a steel one-piece shaft for the 3v S197....Roush and Inland Empire.
I do have the front sway bar removed, but I did not want to go with a aftermarket custom made style sway bar/radiator support because I do not know what the Tech guys would say.
I would think if it is painted black and blended in with the rest of the front end, they may not say anything.
However, we are not allowed to run aftermarket k-members, so an aftermarket radiator support might fall into the same category....maybe ?
