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mhr650 last won the day on May 3

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About mhr650

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    Asheville, NC
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  1. So, it can send flag state to your logger via CAN which is great, can it read GPS from your logger? It wouldn’t save you much, but you would only have to have one GPS antenna instead of two.
  2. The advantage of DI engines is not that they can make more HP at wide open throttle, they are equal or even worse in some cases to a really good port injection engine. The big advantage is being able to run really lean in low load conditions which are almost never seen in racing. With direct injection, wide range variable cam timing, EGR, and boost, the modern engines can switch into and out of high power mode and super lean cruise mode where they are running close to Miller cycle. A cautionary example of what these engines can and can’t do is when Ford put the original 2.0L EcoBoost engine in the Explorer. The available power that engine had vs the weight it had to carry around meant that the engine was forced to run in high power boost mode much of the time and the fuel milage was dismal. The upgrade program was called the FE or fuel economy upgrade, featured a new cylinder head, turbo and some other bits and was worlds better.
  3. The good and bad news is that pretty much any car that would be appropriate for ChampCar is already on the market. There are some incredibly interesting engine programs going on in the industry, but in the US nothing but an SUV will sell so nobody is going to be putting them into anything else. If cars do make a comeback in the future, they will be electric. Like I said there are some really cool projects out there, everyone is looking at this as the last combustion engine project they will ever have and throwing the kitchen sink at it as far as technology. Good for me that I have plenty of combustion engine work left to get me to retirement.
  4. I will be crewing for a car that is exactly that configuration at the VIR 24hr. it is a nice car, still very stock but runs well and with the driver aids can run very consistently. Starting 6 laps down is tough to swallow though.
  5. I know very little about 5 bolt wheel applications, but as someone who has a car that started out with even weirder 4X110 wheels I can feel your pain and offer some general advice about wheel adapters. Whatever you pick make sure it fits an application that is very popular in the aftermarket, I used 4X100 Miata wheels because nothing has as many reasonably priced options available. You will probably need wheels from something that uses a pretty large offset, because there is a limit on how thin you can make the wheel adapters. Big hint, if you look at the picture of my car closely you can see that there is a big difference between the thickness of the front and rear adapters, that is not unintentional.
  6. You have some good points, and I agree that if the whole field is going much faster it doesn’t do anything to improve the racing, of course close competitive racing is what we always want. The problem with raising the points on speed parts comes when the series allows newer, faster cars into the series, that are fast without needing those speed parts. The series must grow and move on, allowing new cars into the series or we become historic racing and some new teams will never come to the series. Some of those newer cars are inherently much faster than the cars that are already running in the series. The only way to allow current cars to keep up is to allow them more and more performance parts, if not they will just be left in the dust. How do you think your stock RX7 would fare in todays ChampCar against the likes of Boxters, and SC300’s?
  7. Very nice work. It’s good that you made it from steel, pretty much every fabricated aluminum oil pan I have ever seen ends up cracking and leaking….back in my professional drag racing days when we ran some really huge and elaborate dry sump pans I had a rule of thumb, the more you paid for an oil pan the worse it fit and the more it leaked. When I was looking at a fabricated oil pan, I had an idea to paint it with something like bed liner to help give it a very tough finish, and maybe even some extra sealing capability. Of course, I never looked into the heat capability of bed liner and the obvious downside is that it would not be as good for heat transfer from the pan, but if you have an effective oil cooler it shouldn’t be too bad.
  8. This brings up another benefit of the approved tire list, it would not only set a maximum performance level for tires, it would also set a minimum performance level. I don’t know anything about the Federal tires you speak of but if they are appropriate race tires for the series, they can be added to the list. By allowing only tires that are known to be suitable for endurance racing it would avoid a new team that didn’t know better from showing up with some rock hard tires that they think will last them 5 races and finding out that they have an overheating, chunking, mess on their hands. Not only does this situation end up ruining their fun of a first event, it contributes to the ever-increasing closing speed problem that we have always had but seems to be getting worse. In response to the thread hijack, of the thread hijack above, I saw a car at a race this year with Radial TA’s mounted. They spent a lot of time off track, but I have no idea why, its possible they still don’t know that those tires are totally inappropriate for endurance racing.
  9. Of all the proposed tire rules one like this makes the most sense. By making it an affirmative list of tires allowed instead of a list of tires banned prevents playing whack a mole every time a hot new tire is released. It should be a living document which can be upgraded periodically, it will become clear in 6 months or so if a new tire is appropriate for endurance racing.
  10. It will have one. Sadly, my ChampCar hasn’t run in 5 years, I am just now getting back into updating it and bring it back. For now, it still has the same Optima battery that we got free many years ago, but I am pretty sure even those batteries won’t survive sitting in my basement for 5 years.
  11. The ATZ-10 is LiFePO4. I have the exact same battery on my KTM, turning over a 1300cc, 13.5:1 compression V-twin is no easy task and it works like a charm every time.
  12. When you look at the market trajectory in 18 months we may be looking back at the good old days when we could get tires that would last a whole 7 hour race...
  13. Daytona this year, winner was determined to have unclaimed parts which resulted in extra points being added to the cars value. Those extra points added laps and caused the car to be moved down the standings. It’s likely that the team didn’t understand the points added, and they probably could have reconfigured the car without taking points.
  14. You used a magic work in your reply, swap, headers on swapped cars are covered by a completely different rule. Any OE exhaust manifold from a vehicle on the VPI List can be used on a swapped engine for zero (0) points. This means you can search for a different header that you can adapt to your car, doesn’t even have to be from a Ford. There are probably lots of decent V6 headers out there that you could search from, older cars would be unlikely to include an integrated catalytic converter. You could use 2 front, or 2 rear headers as required to get the best fit. One thing I am not positive about but believe may be legal is to use a production header from a different application that may have the proper port spacing but a different bolt pattern on the flanges. Can you cut off the flanges and weld on new flanges to fit your cylinder head?
  15. The easy button would be to cut the ball and socket flange off, and plunge into that transition piece with a 2-inch hole saw. This would allow you to use a simple round pipe instead of trying to form the pipe into an oval to match the shape of the converter body. The convert body makes a nice collector shape and while having an expansion in the system is not ideal it wont really hurt your performance. Now if you had that shape before a turbo, we would do everything possible to eliminate expansions and conserve energy but for a simple NA exhaust it will be fine. Replace your third converter with a nice 2 into 1 merge collector as far back as you have room. Then you can make the connection from the rear bank with a single 90deg bend instead of a 90 and then a 180 bend.
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