Race Car Technology

[Outdated]

This is one of my favorites, 2000 meters in 62 seconds downhill on ice in a rally car.

I always loved the Cheap Car challenges because I have mostly had cheap run down cars all my life.

 

[Nitro]

This was captured about three years ago.
I went with my Dad the day he took delivery of it in the summer of 1969 at Yenko Chevrolet in Canonsburg.
It is a numbers matching '69 SS 396 4 speed El Camino with a 4:10 third member

I drove it up until I was 18 then it got handed over to my brother.
He restored it over 30 years ago and brought my Dad in it to his 80th surprise birthday party out at the airport.

Ute my butt, it was a musclecar with a huge trunk area

 

[Outdated]

Breaks my heart to recall how much I wanted one of those smaller pickups, but by the time I could afford one their popularity had already receded from the market.

Today even the Toyota Hilux has been styled like a US "truck". Maybe a lot of people like the idea that they look big and impressive on a highway but they're just too impractical for simple tradesmen. To a tradesman the tray at the back is the all important part. With the US style the tray is too high for lifting heavy stuff in and out all the time and those stupid flared mudguards mean you have to reach over further while carrying something heavy.

Add in the extra cost of fuel these days and they're completely useless to a simple working man.

 

[Nitro]

View attachment 128027
This was captured about three years ago.
I went with my Dad the day he took delivery of it in the summer of 1969 at Yenko Chevrolet in Canonsburg.
It is a numbers matching '69 SS 396 4 speed El Camino with a 4:10 third member

I drove it up until I was 18 then it got handed over to my brother.
He restored it over 30 years ago and brought my Dad in it to his 80th surprise birthday party out at the airport.

Ute my butt, it was a musclecar with a huge trunk area

My little brother and I left Washington county airport at the same time my dad and my other brother took off headed to Oshkosh Wisconsin for the EAA fly-in.

The Taylorcraft cruises at 95 MPH.
Lil brother and I beat them to Wittman Field by about a hour

 

[Outdated]

It is a numbers matching '69 SS 396 4 speed El Camino with a 4:10 third member

This is the Holden range of vehicles from 68 to 71. They seemed to do some things a lot smarter many years ago. Holden actually only made 1 car, but put many different bodies on it.

 

[Nitro]

When GM re-released the Pontiac GTO, it was a rebadged Holden Monaro

 

[Outdated]

When GM re-released the Pontiac GTO, it was a rebadged Holden Monaro

Even back in the late 60s they all had double wishbone front suspension and a limited slip diff as standard, and they have just the right amount of stiffness and flex in the chasis.

Here the limited slip diff was advertised as a safety feature, especially for the family car. What could be more important than the safety of your kids? So I grew up thinking that all cars just naturally had limited slip diffs and I was quite shocked when I started watching Top Gear and found out differently.

 

[Nitro]

I had a '72 Get Tools Out convertible that I built that sported a dialed up Poncho 455 (7.5L) V-8 in it to twist the driveshaft.
Brutally quick and extremely fast back in it's day.

It only ever lost one street match to a Cobra running a 427 side oiler.

I asked my GF, 289 or side oiler?

She said I guess we are about to find out.
Had it been a 289 Cobra, I could have taken it, but all I remember was seeing was his tail lights as they disappeared

 

[Nitro]

I got in a three light stoplight Grandprix one night with a brand new 5-slow Rustang with a manual gearbox.
I toyed with it the first two lights letting the driver think my ride was no match for his "powerful racecar"

On the third light, I dropped the hammer and left him in a cloud of tire smoke.
When he finally caught up to me at another light, he wouldn't even look at me

 

[Outdated]

I had a '72 Get Tools Out convertible that I built that sported a dialed up Poncho 455 (7.5L) V-8 in it to twist the driveshaft.
Brutally quick and extremely fast back in it's day.

The biggest V8 I ever owned was just a 302 Windsor motor in a 1970 ZC Fairlane. I did have an HG Kingswood with a slightly tweaked 253 in it and that was extravagantly quick for it's size but it wasn't going to take on any big blocks. It was great for pulling out on to main roads, up to 50 mph in first gear. The old 3 on the tree column shift was a bit of a disaster if you weren't used to using them though. Try to snap from 1st to 2nd too roughly and the linkages would catch on each other and jam.

 

[Nitro]

LOL

The Windsor series.

They were originally designed to be a lightweight 221 cubic inch engine for the American based Falcon.
When they first released the Mustang in '64, they were offered as a 260 at first then bumped up to the 289.
When SCCA opened up the ponycar based Baby Grand National series, Ford punched out the 289 to a 302.
That still allowed for the blocks to be refreshed up to .030 inch overbore in the cylinders and kept them within the rules of no bigger than 305 inches.
Because the Windsor was never intended to be very big, there are intake and exhaust port constrictions in the cylinder heads.
A clever workaround was fitting the 351 Cleveland heads on the Windsor blocks, but not allowed in SCCA.

Chevy's answer to that was to source their parts bin for the 327/350 bore blocks and a 283 crankshaft.
A very oversquared combo that allowed to some serious RPM without being a grenade from having a lesser bottom end rotating mass.
The regular production option number that got you an SCCA approved baby grand national ride was RPO Z-28, hence the same name of those Camaros

 

[Outdated]

The Windsor motor was a great towing motor, lots of torque even if the acceleration wasn't as good as the Cleveland. But even back in the 60s and 70s Australians were a lot more conscious of fuel consumption than seems to be the case in the US. The Holden 253 was an incredibly popular motor here because of it's small size. They were popular for ski boats as well. And at the time Ford was still making 300 inch straight six motors that drank more fuel than the 253 and weren't any where near as powerful, so that dramatically improved the popularity of Holden.

 

[Nitro]

We were in a horsepower race, and fuel was really inexpensive back then.

I ran a '69 Camaro with a super high compression 350 that would only run on the highest octane available.

I remember pulling into a highway Amoco station in 1979 and seeing a price of 49.9 cents a gallon for their super unleaded fuel,
We would generally burn leaded fuel in our rides back them because the lead served as an exhaust valve stem lubricant and helped prevent erosion of the valve seats.
The downside to it was a buildup of deposits on pistons, valves and combustion chambers that were CCed and held to blueprint tolerances to maximize output.
White gas as we called it because it was clear was excellent at cleaning combustion chamber deposits, so every few tankfuls of leaded fuel, we would run some Amoco to scrub them out.
Highway stations were always more expensive than in town stations and that night was no exception.
"49 and 9?
I'll never pay that for high test"

Went across the street and got Sunoco 260 for 43.9

 

[Shevek]

Even back in the late 60s they all had double wishbone front suspension and a limited slip diff as standard, and they have just the right amount of stiffness and flex in the chasis.

Here the limited slip diff was advertised as a safety feature, especially for the family car. What could be more important than the safety of your kids? So I grew up thinking that all cars just naturally had limited slip diffs and I was quite shocked when I started watching Top Gear and found out differently.

You might like this classic movie scene:

Better with this preamble first:

However, I dropped in here for the race cars. If I were building one for road racing, I'd make the wings vertical. After all, side force is the goal, and running it through the tires with extrad downforce causes many complications.

 

[Nitro]

A NASCAR team set a Car of Tomorrow up with an angled third member.
What it did was placed the right side of that car into the airpath which allowed it to hold roundy-rounder track turns better than the competition.
At the time, there was no rule that you couldn't.

It was outlawed by the next race.


I know, another movie quotes is rubbin' is racin'
We used to call NASCAR racing a demolition derby held on a circular track

 

[Nitro]

Part of a free pour polyurethane bump stop mould we were contracted to make:
https://www.autismforums.com/media/nascar-bump-stop.2153/

 

[Shevek]

I used to hate NASCAR, because every time someone got clever, Bill France would haul them in to try to produce a photo-finish every time.

 

[Nitro]

Wally Parks was supposed to have told Bill France that if their cars were still able to go around a bend after the straightaway that they weren't going fast enough.

 

[Outdated]

However, I dropped in here for the race cars. If I were building one for road racing, I'd make the wings vertical. After all, side force is the goal, and running it through the tires with extrad downforce causes many complications.

Same as in real life, a lot of conversations here tend to branch off in to several different topics.

A NASCAR team set a Car of Tomorrow up with an angled third member.
What it did was placed the right side of that car into the airpath which allowed it to hold roundy-rounder track turns better than the competition.

When I read this all I could think of was these things:

 

[Outdated]

Highway stations were always more expensive than in town stations and that night was no exception.
"49 and 9?
I'll never pay that for high test"

Went across the street and got Sunoco 260 for 43.9

The earliest I can remember paying for fuel was when I first got my license in 81. Standard unleaded was 32 cents a litre. In a rough conversion including the different value of our dollar that's about US 75 cents a gallon.

For some reason petrol has always been cheaper in SA than any of the other states. When I was young I thought it was because we had the country's largest refinery but that closed down decades ago, yet fuel is still on average about 15% cheaper here.