Yes, I had an oops moment….This is the story about the motor I burnt down on the Dyno just before the Knoxville Nationals.

   I have been asked thousands of times how we can get so close to the edge on making maximum power out of a sprint car engine without killing it. Everyone who has been in this business for long enough has seen the damage that can be done when you cross that “Red Line” on either fuel mixture or engine timing, but where exactly is that line? Fortunately, “or unfortunately, lol” I know where that line is, because I crossed it the Wednesday before the “week before the nationals” this year. I had the Ford motor on that we had planned for Donny to run at the Nationals. With a new engine we always like to run it the week before at the Capitani to make sure everything is ok. We were supposed to ship the engine overnight so that the team could have it and get it in the car. I went through the whole break-in process and did my normal checkout before pounding on it, run through the valves, check the filter and such, and everything looked fine. I have thousands of Dyno pulls on the Ford, so I went for broke right from the get-go……

  The first pull went well, ever so slightly lean, so I shut it off and went in to give her some more fuel. The Fords love the fuel:) Fired it back up and went into double check the timing and I was having a little issue with the mark moving around just a bit because of gear clearances from the crank, through the idler gear,  crank gear, then ma

g gear. We had taken off the crank trigger that we use from RCD, and went to a two pickup mag instead. Normally, I can find the happy spot where the gear lash is at its maximum advance point  by loading the engine and watching the where the timing goes as the engine rpm goes up.

Well…. Normally…… I came out to do the second pull and it happened….

    Now even at 62, when I’m on the Dyno I still have really good reaction times, and it was all I could do to not hit the stop button because, in doing so, I would have lost all the data from the run. I knew that would be important in diagnosing the failure so I let the engine go to the top rpm set point. This was difficult for me because when the oil started being pushed out the breather in the oil tank ( note the crankcase pressure on the Dyno sheet) the smoke filled the room. Remember, this all happened in about 7 seconds…..  it was definitely an “OH SHIT” moment.

Ugh

What happened next is one of the main reasons I’m still doing this job at my age. We are a team here at Shavers, and we have been  involved in racing all our lives. I added it up one day and between Ron, Keith, Robert, Dan and I, we  have got about 240 years of experience with engines. The guys never once teased me for burning it down, they just went to work..  (well, they teased a little bit). It was about 11.00 AM when I got the engine off the Dyno and on an engine stand. The guys were already working on the backup motor. The engine I killed TSR014, had a head/ injector combination that we wanted to try and luckily, the heads were not damaged. A new set of valves from Dennis and his blessings, and they went on the backup, TSR015. When I got there the next morning, Henry 015 was ready to go back on the Dyno, this time with the RCD crank trigger back on the engine to eliminate the guessing on timing. The crank trigger is rock solid on the  on the mark with the trigger. The engine made great power and was on an airplane that night. Donny won the qualifying race the following Wednesday and finished on the podium for the Big race on Saturday.

   For all the up-and-comers in this sport, that’s what a championship caliber team does when faced with adversity, and I’m very proud to be a part of it:)

Dynodonnymac

Shavers