2008
| Racing 2008 |
|
Click on photos to
enlarge.
|
Eriez 6-22-08 Being on the road is common place for many teams but we are really geared toward the one night stands. This is race day two for us this weekend. Zimbardi's have been great about giving us a place to sleep and their shop to work out of when we are in the area. After washing the car, we make some changes to the motor and check the chassis set up. We find a like new tire in their dead tire pile that they won't use because it has a pin hole in it. I can fix that... we've run patched tires before without problems. One more tire choice to put on the trailer. The forecast remains 50/50 and radar shows storm cells heading for the track but we're here to race and head further west to Eriez Speedway. We ran this track at the end of May and had a good race except for a push that was caused by a rough ridge in the groove and what we think was a chassis setup that allowed the RF shock to bottom out in the ruts. The resulting RF bounding and push cost us a lot of positions. We changed the setup for this race with extra attention to the RF shock travel. At the pit gate, it was sprinkling and dark clouds were at our back. We waited outside until the last minute and then decided that the clearing skies might give us a chance to race. The promoter was going to get us on the track as soon as possible and gave us a hot lap session on the freshly packed track. The surface was in very good shape and scuffed off to a smooth wide surface. I drew a 19 but ended up in a difficult heat. I started third but couldn't hold off two very strong cars that took the cushion past in one and two. I could stay with them but on a track with good bite, everyone was fast and the fast guys didn't even make any more progress. The weather cleared and at feature time, the track was smooth and dry but still had good bite. I would start 15th. At the drop of the green we charged into turn one... I was on the lookout for trouble, as the outside row had to deal with a dry loose cushion. I planned an escape route off the bottom. There was some wheel banging but everyone made it through. Down the backstretch I got together with the car beside me. We were both lucky that neither of us got over the other's tire. The nerf bar did its job but took a beating. In the row in front of me was the squirrel from the night before and he drove this track the same as he had, the last... high on the squirrel meter (see Stateline below) . I went to the top and could get a run at him going in, but the top of two and four had nothing to match the bite he got off the bottom. I was a bit faster than him but not enough to make a charge that would get fully beside him enough to make him change his line. Again I had to wait for a mistake as we ran nose to tail. This motor was definitely different from the other motor and needed more gear. We had gone one set lower and debated going one more set lower but didn't really know how the motor would work out in the feature. We decided that the track would slick off and that the higher gear might be better. As it turned out, the track did slick off, coming out of the corners, but we still could have used more gear. I tried top, bottom and middle but never found a faster line. On the last lap, turn four, the squirrel made a mistake and got out of shape coming to the checker. I drove up beside him and passed him as we crossed the line. At least that's how it looked to me but in the end, I was about a foot short. If that had happened a lap sooner, I would have cleared him in turn one and had the satisfaction of finishing ahead of him but ... We finished 13th. I didn't make much headway during the feature but no one ahead of me did either. The race went mostly without incident. Except for a late caution, the leaders were only 1/2 lap ahead all race which wasn't much further to the front than a single file restart. The track was good and everyone was fast, but for us, a little more gear might have helped get by the squirrel and maybe the next car. This chassis is now working pretty good and now that we know what our shocks really are, we are able to actually make adjustments that do what we think they should do. With this car I can run different lines without wondering where the car is going to go. Stateline 6-21-08 This would be the first outing for the spare motor. It has been sitting "in waiting" for a couple of years. We've been lucky to not have motor trouble since we had Jimmy D build the primary motor for us. This spare is an unknown, however, but based on the parts it has in it, we expect it to be acceptable. We've been to this track a number of times and realize that the tight turns and long straights could be a competitive challenge for the motor. But it's better than nothing and we'll adjust to it's ability. At the track the weather is threatening. The track had been tore up and watered and is rough as a corn field. The plan is to hustle our races through before it rains. We hit the raw track in hot laps and peel back some of the clumps in the turns and rattle down the lumpy straights. The motor is really pretty good. It's a little soft coming off the corners but that might work out ok, as this track usually gets slick at corner exits later on. The sky is black and there is lightening in a storm that passes close-by but misses us. The promoter runs two classes of heats and then sends us out. My draw of 45 puts us last in the heat. On the start I pass one car on the outside and chase the next car in line. He's a rookie with us but has a lot of experience in mini sprints. His young aggression is either geared to block me or is just wild driving. Either way, he he's pushing the needle high, on the squirrel meter. When I get a run on the outside coming out, he goes to the wall and I have to back out. He swings wide into the corners and then cuts across the bottom cutting me off when I dive in low. The only safe way is to drive in on the top and try to beat him through the corner. The bottom is very tacky and he always gets a good bite coming out. I could drive in deep, very low but if I don't get in deep enough to make him stay high, he'll just chop me in the middle. On top of all of this is the rough track that is throwing the cars off their line as they push and twitch and dart in the corners. Unless this guy makes a mistake and leaves a hole, it's not worth tangling with him as everyone will make the feature. Our effort in the heat will start us 12th in the feature. Officials come around and tell us that we are up in 15 minutes following the third heat. Greg and I discuss the car and the track and make some changes. Huge, billowing clouds, tower over the grandstands as the temperature drops and the wind shifts toward us. The big drops start coming and Greg and I finish getting everything out of the weather. In ten minutes the track is lost and everyone is heading out. The promoter agreed to bring us back next week for the feature and a new complete show. We head to Zimbardi's where we will sleep and work on the car the next day. Canadaigua 6-7-08 We looked at the weather all week and saw a forecast of rain for the Friday night show. We already towed 3 hrs to one rain out this season so as the weekend approached, the threat of rain continued to be forecast, and Greg and I decided not to take a chance on this one. As it turned out, a storm came through on Friday afternoon and they pulled the plug early. Score one for us. This week we headed to Canadaigua, only a couple of hours to the west for us. This was day two of sauna room weather with temps in the 90's and humidity not far behind. The AC works in the truck so it was comfortable on the road (actually, it works because I came up with a timer to cycle the compressor on and off in a bypass circuit to replace what isn't working on the dash). 29 cars showed up for this Sprint Car event that was supported with 3 other classes. Putting the ASCS Patriots on top of the card with some support classes is a major endorsement of the series as Canadaigua is a track that is leased and promoted by WRGI (World Racing Group Inc., formerly DIRT, Inc., etc), the owners of The World of Outlaws, etc. It was a warm, clear night and the stands were 80% full. It was a good crowd and they had come to see sprint cars while the regular DIRT modifieds were on tour somewhere. Without a bunch of heavy, big block modifieds to over work this big half mile, and with the high humidity, the track surface was pretty good. The water they spread doesn't soak much into the glaze from last week's race but is held in place by the inch of loose cushion that they had graded back across the glaze. I always get my motor started and warmed up in the pits before any high speed laps but for some reason at this track they won't let you start your motor on the track and let it run in the pits. The NY tracks don't understand sprint cars and expect that three laps on the track is enough to warm up a dead cold motor. To get around this at all other tracks, I try to be the first in line for the first hot lap session, get pushed off and then pull back into the pits and wait in line, with the motor running, for the second session. By the time I get to the track for the second session, the motor is up to temp and the oil pressure has dropped indicating that the oil has warmed up too. But even with the motor warmed up, as soon as the car moves on the track, the water temp goes way down as air moves through the radiator. I set the motor up so that it will cool on cautions so it doesn't warm up much just running slow around the track. So I was first out for the second session and tried to get some heat in the motor but even with a lean setting on the dialajet, it was colder than it should be when they dropped the green for our two quick laps. The car felt pretty good on the tacky track and we decided to not change anything for the heat. My draw of 19 wasn't too bad and it put me 4th in the third heat. Turn four at this track is very narrow. As you enter four, the inside wall to the peak of the shallow banking is only two cars wide at the most. Then it's flat and then it actually has negative banking toward the outside wall. The track looks really wide there until you look at turn, four from between the turns. The other thing that happens on four is that a nasty ridge builds up above the bottom groove, early, that is right in the middle of the second groove. If you hit it wrong with the RR, it turns the car toward the outside wall. Starting on the outside of row two, and behind and beside rookies, made me a bit cautious as we charged toward that ridge at the start of the heat. I laid back a bit at the start off four to make sure I had some room in case anyone got squirreled up coming out of four and ended up in a tangle in front of me.. The start went OK and I drove into one on the outside. The tacky surface gave a good run to the car on the bottom and I fell in line in fourth. A couple of laps later, the third place car spun in front of me and I went low and avoided him as he backed up the slight banking of the wide turn two. On the restart I ran a tight third and then started to see oil and smoke coming out of the hood. The engine didn't feel much different and I thought that maybe a valve cover gasket was leaking so with only had a few laps left so I decided to back off some and finish so that I'd have a shot at being qualified for the feature and deal with the engine problem in the pits. The oil got worse and when the race ended, I was out of tearoffs. In the pits, Greg pulled the hood off and started removing spark plugs. I got my helmet off and pulled out the leak tester to find out what was going on in the cylinders. Jimmy D, the engine builder, was at the track and showed up immediately. The oil had come out of the breathers and coated every thing on the top side of the motor. I checked cylinders on the left side and none showed any serious problems but when I got to #6, on the right side, there was no compression to even find top dead center. So we burned or scuffed a piston or destroyed the rings or something in that cylinder. Could have been due to the lack of warm up before hot laps or it could have been a weakening due to the timing problems I had earlier is the season but certainly the lack of warmup didn't help. This is my first motor failure in 5 yrs and over 60 races on this motor (two Jimmy D rebuilds with rings and bearings, the only new parts needed). This has been a very good motor and I've tried to be good to it. Greg and I loaded up and watched the feature from the stands. I didn't want to take the green for the feature and risk further motor damage, even though I was still qualified to start. The track made for a good race with a slick middle, some bite on the bottom and a nice cushion that the leaders could banzai without lifting. The fans saw a good race with lots of passing. I pulled the motor Sunday morning and dropped it off Monday at noon for Jimmy to work on. Hopefully it's not damaged too much and we can get parts quickly. In the meantime, I have a spare motor that we picked up from Zimbardi a couple of years ago. We had it in the spare car and have started it but never raced it so we plan to drop it into the car we've been racing and give it a try. Eriez 5-25-08
I drew a 2 pill and would start on the pole for the heat. It rained before we ever got on the track. We towed home. Fulton 5-3-08 The test sessions run off fast and the limited time between runs makes it hard to do much broad thinking. The few times on the track don't provide many chances to try different things. So with the motor stumbling and breaking up it sure was a weird one to diagnose. It seemed like it was really rich at low end and really lean at high end. I had pre-adjusted things ready to swap into the fuel system for the tests and we tried them all. When on the track, I swept the dial-a-jet over a wide range of pill settings. With all the changes, I could make the engine run different, but never much better. I figured that I just couldn't hit the combination or that there was something I just didn't know about that would fix it, so after the test at Fulton I was ready for the dyno. I called H&G and talked to Gus and he could take me in a couple of weeks. Gus is really sharp on these ASCS motors and I wanted to go back there with this motor so that I could compare the new numbers with the ones from before on this motor. The ASCS opener would happen at Fulton before I could get to the dyno. I discussed the problem with Gus and he made some suggestions that I put in place to try at the race. It looked like a certain rainout for days but as the time to leave for the track arrived, it was uncertain when it would rain. At the track it hadn't rained and the weather didn't look to bad. Even with all the threatening weather, 34 cars showed up. The track was already worked in but the moisture wasn't very deep, as usual. I drew a 21 which put us 3rd in the second of four heats. I told Greg that if the motor wasn't right, I was pulling in. I buzzed a corner after I was pushed off and the motor still stumbled but I thought it might have enough power to race so I lined up third. In one lap I was last. I tried some different pill settings for a lap or two and pulled in. "We're parked", I told Greg. " I am out of ideas. We're going to have to go to the dyno". Cousin Tommy started third in his heat and passed some stout cars to win the heat, despite several restarts. When he pulled into the pits he found the RR birdcage (axle bearing and housing) had complete come apart and was dangling on the damaged axle. He had a spare rear but no birdcages and neither did I so Greg jacked up the car and we removed ours to use, as they scrambled to get Tommy's car back together. It's amazing that when minor adjustments seem to make a difference that a car can run as good as his did with everything screwed up. All the qualifying races were run and as they lined up for the feature, the rain finally came and put and end to the night. Greg and I drove home, unloaded the car and pulled the motor. Sunday morning I got up and went into the shop to get everything cleaned up and ready to load up for a trip to PA next weekend for my scheduled day long session with Gus and his dyno at H&G. Gus is a great guy to work with. You do all the work on the motor and that way you learn what your adjustments do when you see the results of a run. Gus has been at this long enough that he's seen most everything and can really guide you toward a solution without a lot of guessing and dead ends. He's one of the best engine builders I've worked with (and this isn't even his engine). I decided to go though everything on the motor and make up a pre-dyno sheet with all the settings and specs so that Gus could look it over while I'm mounting the engine on the dyno. I pressure washed the engine and then checked the valves settings, springs, leak tested the cylinders and barrel valve, cleaned the nozzles, checked spark gap and timing and ...wait a minute... the timing was way off. I checked again and again and pondered what I found. Son of a ....... Setting the ignition timing can be tricky but it's one of the things that I can do in my sleep. I've set it in the shop for years and it's always been perfect at the track. Timing has never been an issue for me. I've shown many people my method. I'm proud of how Duval and I quickly changed mags and set the timing during a red flag at Port Royal once. What stupidity. Double stupidity... once for screwing up and again for not checking. Apparently with all the focus and aggravation of getting this injection to fit along with the fact that I didn't have to touch a mag since last summer, I wasn't paying attention and turned the mag the wrong way to find the "points opening" position. I usually then double check the timing by turning the motor over slowly and making sure that the points open right on the timing mark. I should have checked timing when the motor didn't run right at Brewerton. But it's easy to get focused on something and rule out other variables. If the motors doesn't run right, what changed? Well the obvious answer is... the Injectors... so that must be where the problem is... right? Well yeah, but I had the mag out too! It's not like I didn't think about the mag. I've had mags go bad just sitting in a box over the winter, but I didn't think that changing mags would solve the problem because it didn't feel like an ignition problem to me. I also thought about changing fuel pumps but everything ran ok last year and I removed all the fuel and filled the pump with Mystery Oil for the winter so I really didn't suspect it either. Of course if I had changed mags, I probably would have set the timing correctly on the replacement and then figured the other one was bad and sent it out for rebuild. I would have either spent money on unneeded shipping and testing where they find nothing wrong or they would have replaced the coil, points and condenser, figuring that something was intermittent and charged me $500. I know that when I have a problem where everything seems right but something is wrong that I have to take nothing for granted. That's when I have to step back and "Assume Nothing - Check Everything". Maybe I should add Change Everything too..... or not. April 2008 One thing that I did get to do was dyno all of my shocks and chart them against the standards set up by the shock companies. The results... they shouldn't bother to stamp a shock rate on the part. They were all over the place. The rates might be close at one shaft speed but way different from what it should be, at another. The differences in actual pounds of force were off by 50% to 200%. I even tested some brand new shocks and they were close at one speed but way off at others. One wasn't even close. The shock manufacturers apparently design a shock, determine what parts it took to make the prototype and than mass produce those pieces for shock production. Apparently the problem is that when the things are assembled there are enough small differences that the manufactured ones vary. Now, some of the shocks are coming with dyno sheets but even at that, they are only close at one shaft speed. It's like a grab bag sale. You buy a shock but you don't know what you have until you open the bag and test it. My feeling on this is that we will use what we have based on the rates that they really are instead of what they were supposed to be. I tested 33 shocks and did not find any that we wanted for LF or LR. All the rest of the shocks were combinations that we might be able to use on the right side but even there, we only had a handful that actually measured out to be what we wanted. What we did find was that the one adjustable unit we had, actually allowed us to set it to what we wanted. The team whose dyno I used had found the same thing about adjustables being much more consistent at different speeds. The adjustables have pluses and minuses. The plus is that one adjustable can replace 4 or 5 standard shocks. The minus is that they cost twice or more what a regular shock costs. I guess you would spend less in total for a bunch of adjustables if you were starting from scratch. The other minus here is that if you crash the shock, you loose twice as much and wipe out a bunch of shock rate choices. The performance issues are really the main consideration though and having shocks that are what you expect them to be is very important. So we ordered some left side adjustables. Another unknown for this season is the different set of injectors that we put on our primary motor. If it gets more air in the cylinder, then it should need more fuel (and make more power). But it's never that simple. There will be different amounts of air volume, but the amount of the change will vary with rpm. Setting up the fuel system is best done on the dyno but can be pretty close by the seat of your pants testing on the track. So test day comes at Brewerton. Usually the track is dry and not fast (as it was last time we did opening day practice) so we set up for slick. Of course the track was wet and heavy. First session on the track and the motor was way off. Nothing off the turns and crackling at the end of the short straights. I tried different dial-a-jet settings and that really didn't make it any better. I was hoping that the dialajet would give me some clues. A cushion was building in the turns and my slick setup let the car bicycle in turn one. I stayed away from the cushion after that. Not much time in the pits but I made some changes to the barrel valve and high speed bypass valve and we loosened the car up a bit. Next session- motor was not much better so we made some more adjustments. Last session and it was still way off. In the shop I measured the settings we had gone to on the barrel valve and bypass and got on the phone with Gus at H&G, (where we had dyno'd the engine last). He gave me some ideas of what to try so we decided to go to Fulton for their test session. I hadn't rained for more than a week and when we got there, it was clear that they hadn't put much water on the track and after about 5 laps of the modifieds on the track, the dust was billowing so bad that you couldn't see the cars. It was ridiculous. Fortunately there were only 3 sprints but even at that, I stayed back a half lap and still couldn't see when I got to the turn. Even with a light wind, it didn't clear the corner. The dust was as bad as the worst blinding snow storm I can remember. The picture shows the dust when you could see. We tried a lot of fuel changes and got a lot better but never got the motor completely right and then we ran out of time and they shut down the session and everyone left. After some more discussions with Gus with the info from the tests, I have a better idea of what to do and I think it will be right for the first race at Fulton on May 3rd. Gus's dyno is down for repairs right now but will be fixed after the Fulton race. If I can't get the motor dialed in at Fulton, then it's off to PA with the motor the next weekend (no race scheduled). A positive note from Fulton was the handling. This and Brewerton was the first time out with the new chassis and it felt great. Even on this loose, dry surface, I could really drive it in hard and it stuck pretty good and came off pretty good. It was balanced and neutral even though we were so busy working on engine adjustments that we never had time to play with the chassis outside of dropping RR air pressure. All in all, I was encouraged by the handling and made progress in the right direction with the engine. The handling improvements I will chalk up to the new frame and shock choices based on real measurement. I think we will be OK to race. March 2008 The main project has been putting the car together on the new frame. It is surprising how this 2008 chassis is identical to the 2002 that we used last year. It means that no one has found anything that makes the cars faster. I think that is a good thing. One of the strengths of the sprint car is it's longevity. The saturation of technology has leveled the playing field. The chassis has been refined for so long that no one has found anything better and everyone has settled on a similar configuration. There are a few builders that will continually experiment to try to come up with something that will make the car faster but no one has built a "killer" car yet. If they did, it would be copied in a few months and then everyone who could afford to change would have one. And that's the problem that has been avoided so far. If a chassis becomes uncompetitive, it loses it's value. Teams must spend to get the latest. That may be enough for some teams to just quit racing and other teams to just remain uncompetitive. With things remaining stable (and without rules having to force the issue) teams can concentrate on racing on the track instead of in the shop or at the bank. Stability is a good thing for the sport. On the other front, it seems that there are always gains to be made in horsepower. When ASCS began with it's spec head and 2 3/16 injector, motors were about 600 to 625 hp. Now they are up to about 710 hp while using the same spec heads. That's about where 410s were 10 years ago. Changes in the injectors have improved the efficiency on the intake side and cams have followed to take advantage of the increased air flow. Refinements continue and improvements have not hit a wall yet. So each year, motor builders are getting a little more out of the same basic motor. What all of this means for our team is that we are making some changes in hopes of gaining the slight improvement we need to get to the front. Yes we want to be faster than the other cars and for us we feel that a fresh frame will work better for us so that our adjustments will work better. The frame we were using was perfectly straight but we couldn't make our setups work, so we are making a change. The old frame may work fine for someone else's setup and driving style. Greg has fabricated some fresh side panels and a new radiator box, screen and guard. We've rebuilt some damaged wings and freshened up the running gear for the new car. By mid March, we're ready for the motor. We picked up a different set of injectors for the motor that should give us more power than the set we had been using. Typically putting a set of injectors on the motor is a pretty straight forward process..... but not this time. The Kinsler injectors are different from the Hilborn injectors in many ways. There is a lot of quality in the way the Kinsler set is made. The three piece design makes installation more involved and time consuming but matches up better with the ports in the head. There is a separate injector body for the right and left bank and a cover plate that goes between them to cover the lifter valley. The cover has to be bolted to the block and the side gap to the injectors is filled with silicone. On our motor, the bolt holes in the cover, just barely landed on the rails of the block and it took a lot of work to align the cover so that holes could be drilled and tapped in the block at the edge of those rails. Also, a slot had to be machined in each injector body for a center feed water line that comes out of the heads. It was a very involved process to set up the mill to cut that 3/4 " slot. Then with the pieces clean and on the bench, silicone is applied where the parts will meet and the parts are put on the motor and the silicone allowed to cure. Then the injectors are removed and more silicone is applied to gasket surfaces for final installation. Then the barrel valve, linkages and lines are installed. Sounds simple but there is a lot of cleaning and tinkering and it is very time consuming. Took a very long day's worth of work, over a couple of days, to finish. So now with the injectors fully installed, I drop the magneto ignition in and it wouldn't go. After looking things over, I found that the hole for the mag was misaligned with the rest of the pathway in the block. Not by much but it will probably take .050 to clear. Also, the mag hits the left bank of the injectors. What a bummer. Everything has to come apart, silicone scraped off all surfaces, the cover plate slotted on the mill and the injector body clearanced with a die grinder. all parts cleaned and put back together. Nothin's easy. So work continues as we get ready for the upcoming season. Big worries ahead are the price of gas and methanol fuel. Fuel has gone from 2.30 to $4.00 per gal. The price of gas (fortunately not diesel for us) is always a big part of the cost to race for us with many races four to 5 hour tows. For now all the effort is confined to the shop but soon we'll be on the dirt. February 2008 We have been working on our equipment a step at a time. The first
project Next project is putting a car together on the 2008 J&J frame we
have. We We also dropped our trailer off for Steve Miller to straighten and When the rear engine cars replaced the Roadster at Indy, those cars
ended up becoming supermodifieds at Oswego and other tracks around the country. Steve has been doing this restoration work for many years and has learned the arts of the fabrication methods of the of the day from many of the original car builders that are still around. There were only a hundred or so Indy Roadsters ever built and Steve's work is an extremely important part of the history of Indy racing. January 2008 |
