[Big-Foot]

Racer-X; Brainerd's track record - Good question. Records are typically kept not by the track but by the sanctioning bodies that race there.
Since Brainerd has lost their SCCA certification due to safety concerns, the information is no longer available (that I can find). I do recall that Jerry Hansen ran roughly a 1.12 lap there with his 5 liter ASR car back in the late 70's. That is roughly 150mph average. When I call it the "fastest" track, I meant to say that the track has the longest straight-away with the fastest final and first turns leading up to it. Competitive Trans-Am (GT1) cars will hit 200mph on the straight. I am sure that if CART ever ran a race there that they would top that by 20mph easily.
While BIR is my home race track, my all time favorite is Road America.

Scott - The 302's we run are essentially full stock 5.0 long blocks but instead of EFI we are running 600 Holley double-pumpers (4776) on an Edelbrock Performer RPM intake. We also run MSD ignition systems and Factory Five's headers. With the wind conditions we had on the day of that race, we indeed did run into the wall of wind at 150. While there was still room-to-rev, the engines were just out of power and pulling as hard as they could. Another thing to remember is that these cars accelerate hard to 110-120, they take a long while to get to their absolute peak velocity with these little engines.

ItBites - The Windshield (full) on your Cobra was one of the things that was holding it down on the track. We run the low-profile single spec racer lexan windshield that is maybe 8" tall at the tallest point.

Brake pad knock-back: One of the ways we have been successful at combating this and a number of other little niggling problems is by incorporating a 2# residual valve in both the front and rear brake lines. This also helps maintain a taller pedal under all conditions. Given that most Cobra replicas are manual brakes, we have a tendancy to size the master cylinder smaller to increase the leverage of the pedal. When we do this, we increase the required stroke to fully engage the brakes. The 2# residual valve helps this by keeping the pad continuously engaged with the rotor, thereby lessening the amount of fluid movement required to brake the car.