New Nose for the #974 "Just Glad to be Here" ?

[1FATGMC]

Hi Frank, the problem of looking at NASCAR too close is they have body templates they have to follow, so they are doing the best they can using the body they have to work with.  Also except for Dayton and Dega and even there to some degree they are real interested in down force to go through the corners fast so they have to compromise.  

Down force usually adds drag, not good for us and we have the freedom of doing anything we want at the front of the car.

 

I took John's rendering and tried to add some shadow and highlights to make it maybe look more like he had in mind.  The front would be somewhat like blowfish in that it would try and be teardropped shaped at the front sending some of the air down the sides of the car.  That should help on stability.  And it would take the headlight and grill opening pumps out of the front helping with aero there.  



In this picture I lengthened the wheel base about 12 inches.  I would really like to see this done and the way the frame is it wouldn't be real hard to do.

The advantage would be that the longer wheelbase would help in stability by moving more of the center of gravity forward on the car as we could easily add weight up there and it would also in effect move the center of pressure back on the car at the same time.  Both good things.  If you are interested in what I'm talking about here you might want to go ( HERE ) .

Also this would lower the angle of the front from the very front up to where the air inlet is helping more with the aero drag.  All in all there would be a lot of advantages to making the car a little longer.

I have confidence that John could pull this off.  He is getting quite good at working with glass.

c ya,

Sum

[slocrow]

Hi Frank, the problem of looking at NASCAR too close is they have body templates they have to follow,

Yep, forgot about that Sum but the new 974 shape reminded me of the dam effect Nascar attempts to achive. Thanks for the heads-up.   Frank

[Dave]

whats the dates for this year
Dave

hello  :?:  :?:  :?:  :?:  :?:  :?:  :?:  :?:  :?:  :?:

[sirstude]

Racing starts August 11th for the week.

[1FATGMC]

Racing starts August 11th for the week.

And if you don't have rooms you should call TODAY.  Some places wouldn't take reservations until the 1st of the year and believe me they will all be gone soon if they aren't already gone.

Make reservations you can always cancel.   SCTA site has motel info:

http://www.scta-bni.org/

------------------------------------

Doug did you get the CD's I sent and I'm sending a little surprise out to you today.  Let me know if you get it,

Sum

[purplepickup]

I like the idea of a longer wheelbase too.  That spin last year may not have happened if the car was longer.  I think your ideas look good.

[sirstude]

Sum,  
Yes I did get the CD's.  I have them here at work right now, going to show some of the guys.

Thanks again.
Doug

[WZ JUNK]

I like the idea of a longer wheelbase too.  That spin last year may not have happened if the car was longer.  I think your ideas look good.

I agree with the longer wheelbase idea.  There has been some discussion of narrowing the front track width but I like the idea of keeping the front wheels as far apart as possible to help with stability.  The accident two years ago was a car that was long with a narrow track width.  I know that streamliners have a narrow track, but if they spin it can cause a big problem.  I think they call it a pencil roll.  I can see how it gets that name.

John

[sirstude]

John,  Sure looks like the group here is trying to make work for you.  I do agree, with my very limited knowledge, on the longer front end.  The other thing I always wonder about, and I know there is nothing you can do about it with the current engine config is the hood bubble.  Just need to find a free centrificial blower.

Doug

[Ohio Blue Tip]

I wouldn't change it until someone beats the record.  Then maybe?

"Life's too short to drive an ugly car!"

Just my $.02 worth.

[sirstude]

As they say, 'Ugly is in the eye of the beholder".  I forgot to say that I like it, although I am kind of "a bubble off" so you never know.  I like Poteet's car too.  Maybe it should be stretched as much as Burklands Datsun was/is.  I sure remember the first time I saw that car and the reaction I had to it.

Doug

[sirstude]

John,

Is there any way that you could put come of the hood bubble below the hood, kind of around the top of the engine.  Then mate the hood to it.  The main reason for the size is to slow the air down, isn't it?  I know it would be a lot of extra work, but seems to my uneducated mind, that it would smooth out things and possibly help the airflow.

Doug

[WZ JUNK]

John,

Is there any way that you could put come of the hood bubble below the hood, kind of around the top of the engine.  Then mate the hood to it.  The main reason for the size is to slow the air down, isn't it?  I know it would be a lot of extra work, but seems to my uneducated mind, that it would smooth out things and possibly help the airflow.

Doug

I do not know if I am understanding you correctly.  Here is a link to how I ended up with the shape of the scoop.  http://purplesagetradingpost.com/sumner/hooley/hooley-construction-2005-1.html   It was a form follows function design.  The engine compartment underneath the whole front clip is now pretty full of stuff and I can make it more rounded or longer but I do not have much room to make it smaller.  If you compare the way the engine compartment looked the first year with the unblown injected engine to the way that it looks today, it goes from nearly nothing to all kinds of wiz bang stuff with pieces and lines and stuff everywhere under the hood.

Good thoughts, keep thinking.

John

[1FATGMC]

John,

Is there any way that you could put come of the hood bubble below the hood, kind of around the top of the engine.  Then mate the hood to it.  The main reason for the size is to slow the air down, isn't it?  I know it would be a lot of extra work, but seems to my uneducated mind, that it would smooth out things and possibly help the airflow.

Doug

Hi Doug, I know the blower inlet looks big and we could have made it much lower and it would have worked, but I feel this is actually helping the aero drag at the front of the car.  If it was lower you would run the air into the top of the windshield.  This way we are moving the air more gently to the top of the car.  It is legal with a blown car to have it like we do.  If the car was unblown they have limits to the height just to eliminate people getting an unfair aerodynamic advantage.  Since it is legal for us we may as well take advantage of it.

Now saying that I would like to not see it there at all and see the car running twin turbos as a first choice or a single centrifugal blower second choice as they are so much more suited to what we are doing than a roots type blower due to the fact you can run an ice water intercooler.  Who know what time will produce though   .

   

Here is the Datsun you referred too.  It was the original 411 car and is the number he uses on his current streamliner.  The Datsun still holds the B/BFCC record at 294.868 mph set in 1985.  He asked me this fall if we were going to move from blown gas to blown fuel and go after his record as we run a B motor also.  I told him no and that if we did I didn't think he would have a thing to worry about.  I do believe that a twin turbo stude could run 300.  He was running a hemi in the datsun.  He says they were doing preliminary motor development with the datsun that would be used in the streamliner.  He also sold the datsun to raise funds to build the streamliner.  I've only seen the datsun once and it was running a flathead with a new owner.

   

This is his Stude you were talking about and I think it held a record around 255.  I think the fastest record with a stude was around 275 (I had a picture of it, but can't find it).  There are more pictures of his stude as it currently looks ( HERE )

It was the stude you saw in "The World's Fastest Indian".  One other comment he has was this car had so much downforce on the front they had to really reinforce the sheet-metal there.  The other new stude there this last year that used the same front we did stretched it and took the headlights off and they had problem at speed of the air pushing the front down into the wheels/tires.  We need to be careful of this potential problem.

If I can find the 275 mph stude picture I'll post it.

c ya,

Sum

[1FATGMC]

   

I found the picture of the Thompson Stude and here is some history that Tom sent me about it:

The Neil Thompson Studebaker actually held the A/CC record from 1966 to 1985 at 265.131 (this was before all of the class splits for blowers and fuel-vs-gas took place) with a one way run as advertised on the side of the car at 278. Our Datsun raised this record to 294.868 in 1985. This photo shows the configuration before it was converted over to a 69-71 Corvette one piece fiberglass nose piece. Along with the Corvette nose it got a dark blue very heavy metalflake panel paint job over a silver base that was run through the mid 70's. It was this car that through the early 70's held all the comp coupe records (except for the flathead X class owned by George Vose's Crossley) from a 170 cubic inch slant six Chrysler normally aspirated all the way to the large displacement blown fuel Chrysler V-8. Greg Fraizer drove it with injected small block Chevy power to an E class record in the mid 220's with two runs that were identical speeds to the thousandth. In 1969 he drove it with Chrysler power to a 248 record in the B class. This is the record our Studebaker reset in 1978 with a 255.863 average using 372 cubic inch iron Chrysler blown fuel power.

One thing to remember is that the car above and Tom's studebaker like I showed in the last post weren't allowed to run the rear spoiler and more important the vertical spill plates on the side of the spoiler back then.  I have a lot of admiration for those guys running that fast without them.

   

Here is the car that ran for the first time this year from Oregon, maybe Wash., but I don't think so.  They saw the writeup on Hooley's car a year or so ago and build this one and did a great job at it.  They used the same glass front Hooley did, but bought 2 and made it longer.



If it was mine thought I would work it over to look more like the above rendering I just did.  Like I said they have a lot of down-force on the nose and changing it like this would send more air down the sides of the car.  That is what Blowfish did and others and what I would like to see us do if we change the front.

I thought Tom's history was pretty interesting,

Sum