Tyler H wrote: How about the zero penalty lap Team McQueen 400SX Chumpcar? Toyota 1UZ-FE V8 in a 240SX. Lots and lots of butthurt in the Chumpcar community. Rumors of 400hp and 160+ mph at Brainerd, followed by forum outrage and rulebook turmoil that continues to this day.
Is there a forum post somewhere to read up on this?
Adrian_Thompson wrote:Tyler H wrote: How about the zero penalty lap Team McQueen 400SX Chumpcar? Toyota 1UZ-FE V8 in a 240SX. Lots and lots of butthurt in the Chumpcar community. Rumors of 400hp and 160+ mph at Brainerd, followed by forum outrage and rulebook turmoil that continues to this day.Is there a forum post somewhere to read up on this?
Quite a few, in fact: ChumpCar 400sx
iceracer wrote: Back before the NE dirt track modifieds became cookie cutter cars they actually ran stock bodies. First it was which was faster, coupe or sedan, then we started with Valiant, then Gremlin with everyone following the trend. I used to say, if someone painted their tires green and won, next week every one would have green tires and arguments about which shade was faster would proliferate.
A friend told me that someone was cleaning up at the old Danbury Race-A-Rena with a car that had a weight bolted to an exposed section of the frame. Everyone spent the rest of the season trying to bolt different size weights to different parts of the car. At the end of the season, he sold the car and got out of racing. The new owner discovered the "weight' was a piece of painted plastic. The car was fast because of some other suspension settings, but everyone was so busy chasing the "weight" they never noticed what else he was doing. Slick.
I think I heard of that. Now they weigh the cars after the race.
ross2004 wrote:Adrian_Thompson wrote:Quite a few, in fact: ChumpCar 400sxTyler H wrote: How about the zero penalty lap Team McQueen 400SX Chumpcar? Toyota 1UZ-FE V8 in a 240SX. Lots and lots of butthurt in the Chumpcar community. Rumors of 400hp and 160+ mph at Brainerd, followed by forum outrage and rulebook turmoil that continues to this day.Is there a forum post somewhere to read up on this?
Man that's what happens when racing E36 M3ty cars gets taken too seriously?
I just indexed my celica with a 1uz swap, 900 points.
Off topic, sorta, but so are some of the other "creative cheating" posts.
I've heard of guys drilling small holes in exhaust valves, which would pass enough air to lower cranking compression, but not enough to lower compression at operating rpm. So, they got to have a 14:1 compression engine show 11:1 on the tester.
Stampie wrote:snailmont5oh wrote:I'm pretty sure he used the words "accident waiting to happen" when I was told I couldn't do it.Stampie wrote: And Rick thought I was crazy when I wanted to do a no suspension Challenge car.Hey, 90% of the suspension is in the tires anyway. Go for it!
Karts don't have suspension, and look how fast they are! ;)
In reply to snailmont5oh:
Exactly my thought. I think I even described it as a go kart on steroids.
After Mopar set loose the 1964 426 Race Hemi in NASCAR, Ford responded with an FE-series based 427 but with hemi heads and chain-driven SOHC hemi heads that they cooked up in 90 days and would murder the Race Hemi. Dodge went back to the drawing board and designed a DOHC 32-valve 426 Hemi but had issues with valvetrain and getting it to hold up.
So instead, they acted like the engine was fine, invited Bill France (head of NASCAR) over and showed him the A925, as it was called, sitting there on a stand and told them that this was their next step and that they were ready to put it in and run it. France immediately got scared of it and banned any and all OHC engines in NASCAR and stated that any engines run in NASCAR had to be available in a production car. Mopar had no intentions of ever actually racing with the engine, they just wanted to make France flinch into banning the Ford Cammer. They sat out the '65 season and then came back in '66 after making the Street Hemi available in B-bodies, while Ford's 90-day wonder vanished from the stock car racing front due to the fact that it was too large, expensive and complicated to put into a car sold to the general public (although they originally said they were going to make Cammer-powered street cars and even teased a street-trim Galaxie equipped with one)
snailmont5oh wrote: Off topic, sorta, but so are some of the other "creative cheating" posts. I've heard of guys drilling small holes in exhaust valves, which would pass enough air to lower cranking compression, but not enough to lower compression at operating rpm. So, they got to have a 14:1 compression engine show 11:1 on the tester.
We hadn't tried that but if they use a puffer to check displacement a handfull of cigarette filters can make a big engine measure smaller then blow harmless out the exhaust. I've been told anyway
snailmont5oh wrote: Off topic, sorta, but so are some of the other "creative cheating" posts. I've heard of guys drilling small holes in exhaust valves, which would pass enough air to lower cranking compression, but not enough to lower compression at operating rpm. So, they got to have a 14:1 compression engine show 11:1 on the tester.
You want to talk about creative cheating, look at some of the stuff that Smokey Yunick pulled off. For example, NASCAR had rules against lightweight flywheels at the time, so he would take a flywheel and press the ring gear off, then drill into the flywheel laterally and then reinstall the ring gear and cover the holes up. There was a rule against porting cylinder heads, so he instead just pumped an abrasive slurry through them to polish them to a mirror-like shine. To get extra range, he ran massive diameter fuel lines that would contain extra fuel. When NASCAR imposed a ruling on maximum fuel line size, he then zig-zagged them back and forth under the full-length of the floorpan for exactly the same effect.
The story goes that he won a race and then his car was sent for mandatory tech inspection. It was extensively scrutinized due to his reputation as a known "inventor". The fuel cell is completely out of the car and the tech inspector states that he has found 17 violations. A pissed-off Smokey hops in the car and fires it up, yells "Make that 18" and drives out of there sans fuel cell.
snailmont5oh wrote:Stampie wrote:Karts don't have suspension, and look how fast *they* are! ;)snailmont5oh wrote:I'm pretty sure he used the words "accident waiting to happen" when I was told I couldn't do it.Stampie wrote: And Rick thought I was crazy when I wanted to do a no suspension Challenge car.Hey, 90% of the suspension is in the tires anyway. Go for it!
But every Kart race I've seen proves they are accidents waiting to and frequently finding somewhere to happen!
Also, not racing-related specifically, but definitely automotive-related, this is a bit of "rumor-paranoia" that gets told incorrectly quite frequently.
In' 60, Chrysler Corp. president William Newberg, who had just received the position in that year, overheard Chevy general manager Ed Cole talking about a new "smaller" Chevy at a Detroit garden party. Shortly before this Chevy had launched the compact Corvair, so Newberg assumed that GM was going to downsize their fullsize cars in response to growing Rambler compact car popularity and the recession of a few years earlier.
Newberg went back to the office and immediately ordered Virgil Exner to do a crash-course redesign of the upcoming '62 Chryslers. Exner had been struggling to top his '57 designs to begin with and then was forced to take the fullsize cars and squeeze the styling down onto a stretched Dart/Valiant chassis. Also, accountants took charge of the program, demanding that the redesign be done as cheap as possible, meaning they couldn't use planned wraparound bumpers, curved glass or the new roofline Exner had planned. Exner protested loudly at every step of the way, but was overridden by Newberg who did not want to be caught out by GM's "new smaller car". Also, although the rumors would have been quite easy to double-check, due to Detroit being quite an insular place at the time, nobody eve did or questioned Newberg. Instead, they deluded themselves that the downsized '62s would be a big hit.
Before they hit market, Chrysler did an internal audit over accusations that executives were handing out contracts to companies that they had financial interests in. Low and behold, Newberg had interests in 3 Chrysler suppliers and had received about $455,000 from them. Stockholders thew a fit and Newbeg got outed after just 60 days. Lynn Townsend took over from him.
By this point the restyled '62s hit the market and torpedoed, with a 25% drop in sales. The styling was absolutely bizarre and awkwardly jammed on truncated chassis. For years dealers had been telling people that bigger was better and then Chrysler did the exact opposite. And despite being smaller, they still cost as much as the competition. Chrysler needed a scapegoat, and with Newberg gone, they fired Exner due to the cars being his design, despite the fact that he was the only one who protested the idea. Even more irony, Exner's 63 designs sold massively well.
And the "new smaller Chevy": It wasn't a downsizing of fullsizes. Ed Cole was talking about the upcoming Chevy II Nova.
In local R/C racing, a guy came in with a standard Futaba wheel remote controler. All others at the time were black plastic, with bits of chrome. This one was bright, florescent orange with the chrome stripped of. There were a couple of lighted toggle switches on top.
The owner mumbled something about digital, and prototype, but little else.
He cleaned up for months. Everyone was so focused on that they psyched themselves out.
It was all fake. A couple of wires to light the switches, and some orange Krylon. People were easier to fool in 1990.
minivan_racer wrote:ross2004 wrote:Man that's what happens when racing E36 M3ty cars gets taken too seriously?Adrian_Thompson wrote:Quite a few, in fact: ChumpCar 400sxTyler H wrote: How about the zero penalty lap Team McQueen 400SX Chumpcar? Toyota 1UZ-FE V8 in a 240SX. Lots and lots of butthurt in the Chumpcar community. Rumors of 400hp and 160+ mph at Brainerd, followed by forum outrage and rulebook turmoil that continues to this day.Is there a forum post somewhere to read up on this?
My read on the situation: Crapcan racing is fun...amateurs (that's me in this spectrum,) who are building and racing as hard as they can and sure everyone on at pointy end of the field are cheating.
There is no trick or secret -- professionals have caught on that it's fun and in the paddock at any given chumpcar race, real professional and semi-professional racers and builders are flying under the radar and having some fun.
A friend has been bracket racing the same car since about 1968. Really.
That itself is enough to rattle people, but lane choice can be a real bug for some people. Guy comes up to friend, says " What lane do you want?". Friend replies, "I dunno. Follow me up."
It pretty much broke his brain that he couldn't prepare. Bad light. Very bad light.
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