The Craftmans Shop > PowerSports

Past Life

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Hyper:
I think they are on my old desktop in storage because most of them were downloaded from the internet.  I know I don't have nearly as much as I should.  Didn't have a camera phone then  :doh:  Here's one..

This is my buddy Dustin the first time he dared to get in the car.  This was the Action Express 9 car that won the 24 in 2010.  We hired Dustin out of the Nascar Tech school and the 24 Hour in 2009 was his first race ever.  We were fastest in practice, started on the pole, led most of the race and won.  I told him to quit racing because it will never get any better than that.  I was fortunate to have him on my car.  He was green but very easy to teach and willing to learn.  He was so ambitious to get to go over the wall for pitstops that he has lost over 100 pounds since this picture and is now the fueler. 

Hyper:
This is something a little different.  At the end of 2011 we took the car to Mooresville to do a windtunnel test.  It's big money to rent the wind tunnel and you have to gather a lot of info for it to be worthwhile so everything has to be done very fast, which is normal, but it also has to be extremely accurate.  This was fairly easy on the Dp's.  Everything is accesible and changes could be made quickly and accurately.  The pushrod suspension made a lot of that possible.  Spring changes on that car were measure in seconds with no effect on the suspension settings.  Changing the springs on the GT3 was a complete pain though.  Particularly thanks to the German's insistence on soldiering on with a strut front end.  Changing springs on that car required a trip to the scale pad to recheck every measurement and adjust accordingly.  For the windtunnel that wasn't possible.  Also with a pushrod set-up, ride height was very predictable since it was accomplished without changing the spring preload.  That is not the case with a conventional coilover as preload is the height adjustment so there can be some variation through the range.  One thing we needed to do at the test was run through a range of ride heights so this is what I came up with...


This is just PVC tubing.  The main section was split lengthwise and sectioned to compress to the needed O.D. and then the 2 larger collars towards the bottom are solid and slide over the main shaft to keep it together.  To adjust height we would put the car up on the air jacks, slide the upper collar down to allow the smaller split rings to slide in and then slide back up to hold them in place.  The split rings allowed us to adjust a predetermined amount in a matter of seconds.  Kinda hokey, but it worked out great.

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