The use of hollow stem titanium intake valves is slowly beginning its reach into the drag racing community, as a few Top Fuel teams are taking on the use of these weight saving and power enhancing parts that are used in many other series. Sometimes it just takes the drag racers a bit longer to embrace newer technology, notes Tom Abbett, team manager and cylinder head specialist at Mike Ashley Racing.
According Abbett, this type of intake valve significantly lightens the overall valvetrain and is easier on the
Roy Johnson, engine builder for son Allen Johnson’s NHRA Full Throttle Drag Racing Series Pro Stock Dodge Stratus, lives to demolish the valve springs provided by Performance Springs, Inc. (PSI). “Valve springs are an ongoing problem for us. If I get a good spring, I can always find a way to tear it up by increasing the engine’s rpm and changing the cam lift velocity. The advances in materials and the heat treat processes that PSI has developed help but they can hardly keep up with us. By the time they learn something, we find another way to destroy the spring,” Johnson said with a chuckle.
Until relatively recently it has been acceptable to keep racing gearboxes relatively simple and add ancillary systems externally. But space inside a racecar is at an ever-greater premium, mainly due to the overriding demands of aerodynamics squeezing the internal volume in pursuit of better airflow. It was once perfectly acceptable for oil pumps and filters to be mounted in the lines to the gearbox oil cooler. But now these things are an unwelcome accessory and racecar designers want to see them integrated into the ‘box.
For years now, race component manufacturers have closely guarded their proprietary metal super finishing processes. Using increasingly finer grinding mediums to produce the desired surface finish whilst still complying with the precise geometric requirements of the component.
High-performance racing engines create a hostile environment with the presence of extreme temperatures and aggressive fluids. The polymers used for rubber seals and mouldings are often extremely costly, where even a simple O-ring can cost upwards of £35. However, recent advances in rubber compounding offer some lower cost alternatives.
A piston can’t do a good job unless it has a good ring pack, and likewise, a good ring pack will be useless without a good piston.
The Pro Stock contingent of National Hot Rod Association Full Throttle Drag Racing competitors has always had a problem with pushrods: they just can’t find a way to stop them from burning up, particularly at the cap.
Ever the innovator, NHRA Funny Car crew chief Austin Coil of John Force Racing is currently investigating the use of JFR-produced forged steel ring land inserts on the Venolia pistons used on 14-time Funny Car John Force’s Ford Mustang. “It is a lot like units that the diesel pistons have and the approach was used very successfully in the turbocharged Honda Formula One cars, back in Ayrton Senna’s day,” Coil told us. “But since we can’t afford a million dollars for pistons, we have to find some way of doing it other than the electron beam routing they used.”
The oil pump in any engine has been likened to the human heart. At the core of operations it provides the essential life-giving fluid to all the other components and surfaces in the system. And while there are many other similarities, unlike the human heart, the oil pump seems to be accepted as some form of necessity but given very little attention thereafter.
The humble cylinder bore seems to get very little press these days. Arguably the most critical surface in any combustion engine, the inside surface of any cylinder liner is exposed to the full flame temperature and the high pressures of combustion and yet still has to form an almost gas tight seal against the piston ring. And all this we ask with minimum wall thickness and hence minimum weight. While the more modern high performance engine designs might have any form of nickel ceramic coating over an aluminium alloy base material for light weight, low friction and optimal lubrication, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to most that the vast majority of cylinder
