How to win
People say you should win and lose with the same ”face”. But who can cry when winning? Some wins are good, some wins are great, and some we still think about. To us the best wins were not when we had a 502” with a blower and we won against a 350”. It would have been embarrassing to lose. The fun wins to us are the ones where we mechanically were the underdogs, where the other guy had spent so much more than us, and of course it helps if he bragged about being able to win well before the race.
We’ve lost races where we still thought it was fun, racing is fun even if you lose, right? If you go to a dragrace with quarter finals etc., let’s face it, half the cars lose their first race, and all cars except 1 end up losing. Losing is part of racing. But…it’s painful to lose when you know you should have won. We remember one race in a car club we were members in, we had a daily driver car that was one of the fastest in the club, and could still be used on a daily basis in rain and snow. One member had started circuit racing and had a car built for that (by himself), everything was taken out of it to save weight (we still had air-conditioning). So everybody were pretty certain he was the fastest in the club. Well when the race took place we ended up in the final against each other. He was fastest from the light due to low weight and high numerical gearing, after 50 yards we slowly overtook him, on brute well tuned power. Then “disaster” happened. 50 yards before the finish line we suddenly felt that the engine was lacking fuel, it stumbled a little, and the other guy drove past us with a smile we’ve never forgotten. What happened? Well we knew the car had a fuel delivery issue, but it had been a while since we’ve experienced it and we were busy with work and other stuff in the days before the race. The bottom line: We were not properly prepared. Tip #1: Be Prepared. Meaning your car has to be fully up to it. If your car occasionally bogs or overheats or can’t start when hot, fix it. When you race you use the car to the limit, it has to be perfect.
In general 5 things decide if you win or lose.
- Is the car in good shape?
- Have you chosen the correct parts?
- Is the car properly tuned?
- Your driving
- Various tips
On 1. We discussed this a little. There’s not much more to say, you know yourself if everything is working. And let’s face it, on a performance car there’s always something that needs fixing. The days before the race you should have time to fix the car and do nothing else. You want to win, right?
On 2. See section Which parts to buy
On 3. See section Tuning
On 4. We won’t claim to experts in this area. But there are some things you have to learn. One is to leave the line fast. Not with too much wheel spin. This requires releasing the clutch or brake at the same rpm every time. Here you have to test and find the fastest rpm. And be prepared to adjust if the track is cold or hot. Secondly it’s critical at what rpm you shift gears. We could do a graph like this:
This could be the rear wheel horsepower curve from a dyno, then done 3 times to reflect the different gears. In theory you should shift gears when the higher gear curve crosses the current gear curve. We’ve tried it, but we’ve sometimes found that changing as late as possible gives the fastest acceleration. But feel free to experiment, there can be a few meters gained after ¼ mile…
On 5.
Here are some tips. Some may be repeats of what’s mentioned in other sections, some will be totally independent. They come in random order
- Keep the air filter. Never throw it away, the air filter helps straighten out the flow into the carb
- Buy the biggest air filter you can find room for, this gives less restriction
- Cold air aids power. You can gain 20 HP by routing cold outside air to the air filter instead of warm engine room air
- Mount the ignition coil on the firewall, not the engine, so it doesn’t shake to death
- Mount the ignition coil upside down so water and dampness can’t accumulate around the ignition lead tower
- Weight is acceleration’s worst enemy. Take out spare wheel, fuel canister, maybe even backseat, front seat, hood. Weight is especially bad at the front, because at the back it helps get traction (on a rear drive car). In the old days some people took a new car, stripped it, dipped it in acid so all metal got thinner, and then assembled it again. Sometimes they overdid and the car got too weak structurally and had be thrown away. Smokey Yunick sectioned cars, cut part of them out, and welded them together so they looked like original. Mercedes got their silver colors because they were unpainted aluminum to save the weight of the paint
- If your battery is fine so it can fire up the ignition, take the wire from the generator or have a switch on the instrument panel. This saves resistance
- You can go one step further, take off the power steering belt
- Buy smaller wheels. It’ll look strange but it’ll effectively lower your gearing and reduce the spinning weight, both give faster acceleration
- Reduce the rear tire pressure by 5-10 psi, makes for better traction. Remember to increase before driving home or the tires could get too hot
- Keep fuel lines and hoses away from hot exhaust and engine, cold fuel lowers intake temperature and gives more power. Some racers route the fuel line through a canister, and when racing they fill that canister with ice. Could be another 15 HP…
- Turn off the A/C, lights etc.
- Close windows, open windows adds drag
- If the location permits, dismantle the exhaust from the headers, then bolt together with one bolt so that they don’t align. Make sure it’s tight, you don’t want your exhaust to pole vault your car over the moon. Or you can buy and weld in exhaust flappers, so you can just open them from inside the car
- Notice fuel pressure at Wide Open Throttle (WOT) on your externally mounted fuel pressure gauge. If it drops below 3-4 psi, you lose power
If you managed to read this far, you’ll get a little anecdote (but true). We told above about our worst defeat. Now you should hear about our sweetest victory. It was in the same car club. That year’s challenger was a Hot Rod. And bearing in mind the tip above on weight and we had a musclecar, it was going to be difficult. Further his Hot Rod had a Jaguar rear axle, which means almost no wheel spin, just pure acceleration. Both cars had 350” engines, headers, cam, carb, intake etc. But we had a nitrous system, and that was 20 years ago so most people had no idea what it was. And of course we had the best tuned car. We met in the final. When the arms went down his car just accelerated like crazy. We had a good start as well but had to feather the throttle, after 50 yards we were 3-4 car lengths behind, and it looked impossible. Then we hit the nitrous button and started to reel him in. Finally we saw the finish line come at us and we overtook him. Was it soon enough? Both of us stopped as fast as we could and backed back to the finish line to find out who won, it was that close. We won. The next weeks were quite fun because everybody knew his car was fast, nobody could understand it could be beaten by an ordinary relatively heavy musclecar.
Truth told, that ordinary musclecar did 12 second ETs, pretty quick 20 years ago. If you have patience for it here’s another situation that we fondly remember. We were out testing that musclecar one evening, nitrous and all. Then we met a colleague from our dayjob, he was taking his girlfriend to the movies in his Alfa Romeo GTV. He always bragged how fast it was, and he didn’t have high regards for American iron. He was a nice guy though. That evening we drove on the same road as him, right behind him and decided to teach him a lesson. We accelerated all we could, nitrous included, and overtook him easily. He did all he could but as you can imagine his Alfa was easy prey, we accelerated from him so fast he quickly disappeared in the review mirror. The next day I looked him up at work and asked how the movie was. “What movie?” he said “After being beaten like that I was in shock, I drove home, never thought a car could go that fast.” He’d learned the hard way what a well tuned American V8 can do.