Tangerine Racing in the house!, Chris arrived at 1Am..... Options

[Jake Raby]

The Tangerine crew pulled in to the shop at around 1Am this morning....

Chris has come down to install his new F Production RAT engine with HAm heads that are VERY insane! We are finishing up the engine today and it should be on the dyno tonight and tested tomorrow. We plan on doing some extensive testing with this engine to scrounge every bit of power it possibly has out of it. I plan on doing some carb and velocity stack swaps, venturi swaps and we are even going to do some DTM testing with it Vs Chris' modified corvair fan arrangement both for power as well as running temp comparisons.

This is actually the least developed engine that we will be building Chris as it is the "Regular Season engine". It is still a very nasty animal that will make gobs of power, but since it's a regular season engine it also has to be much more longevity filled and therfore not as many risks can be taken with its tolerances.

The "Runoffs engine" is a different story. It only has to live for two hours for one weekend of racing so it will have every trick known to man and even crazier HAM heads.

With Chris' excellent driving skills and a pair of RAT engines with Len doing things to the heads that have never been done before to this level it is our goal to get a 914 on the podium at the runoffs and thats something that hasn't happened in about 20 years!

If anyone wants to come out to Atlanta this weekend send me an email to boss@aircooledtechnology.com and I'll tell you where we are going to be so we can meet.

[Jake Raby]

The lack of sleep did play into todays events..

The engine suffered a mishap in the qualifying session from what appears to have been either a carb leanout condition or a blown spark plug gasket!

To make a long story short Chris came into the pits and the engine was making a sound like a spark plug had blown out... We checked the valves and etc and all was well and the plugs were tight... Upon closer inspection when I removed a plug I found 1/2 of it melted away like a torch had hit it!

Chris was operating on hardly any sleep, New engine (with MUCH more power than he had ever had before) on an unfamiliar track and could not concentrate well do to all these things.

The high CR that the engine has worked its way right up the spark plug and torched a nice trench right next to the plug...... Almost like the plug gasket failed and caused a small leak that got bigger and then caused the failure.... Len has quite a bit of work ahead of him to repair it.

Oh well atleast he can still race tomorrow with the old engine while we start repairing this one for the next races.

As for making power...
My dyno is very accurate. It is so accuarte that at the SE Dyno Day EVERY car there made nearly exactly 18% less at the rear wheels than I did on my dyno for peak numbers and the curves were also very close.... By the same token I have had an engine dynoed in Socal that made 176HP and after optimizing here if was only able to make 165.... I also had one of mine dyno here at 152 at the flywheel and then at 159 at the rear wheels in Central California..

I know from dynoing hundreds of engines on my dyno what "is" and "is not" a bad ass engine... Considering the fact that this engine is not even designed to make over 180 HP I'd say its insane. Our goal for the regular season engine was 175! We didn't get as much CR as we will with the runoffs engine and it will also get a cam change and another set of heads and I'm sure it'll make well into the 190s. The dyno may not be everything, but it also does not lie in tuning the engine- I typically don't care about power I want to achieve optimal tuning under dyno conditions and then the driver can use my assistance in their climate- Engines change with the weather and if you can't tune to compensate you are leaving a huge chunk of your power at the dyno cell. The weather data from a dyno session is just as important as the raw numbers and corrections to replicate that tuning in the car..

No matter what the dyno tells us the fact is that Chris has THREE N.E. Division Championships under his belt with engines less than 150 HP. The absolute raw numbers from this engine are higher than that at 6,000 RPM and I'm at 1320 feet! If he can use the power we put behind him I know we have a serious competitor on our hands in FP.

How Chris will cope with the higher power is yet to be seen. It will take some getting used to and will probably necessitate some gear ratio changes to optimize.

I am not disappointed at all with the engine or power at all. We had a weak link and that was either a carb or the sparkplug and we'll have to work around it and learn from it.... I'll probably stay at the shop tomorrow and work on the head issue and not go back to the track, especially if the weather is bad like the forecast looks....

It was nice to meet the other 914 club guys!