If somebody wanted to come in to rent a third car, what’s the price tag?
Del: It would be more than $100,000 per race.
We hear that a lot of the larger teams are gobbling up critical engine parts out there. Is that an issue for you guys in running your team?
Del: Critical parts?
As in cranks, rods and pistons.
Del: You have to lead your parts a lot more than we used to. If we see we are going to need pistons we’ll order them three or four months in advance. We’ll call Tom Prock over at Venolia and get an order going. It’s also a problem with crankshafts – they are hard to get. You’ve just got to be more organized, you’ve got to know where you are and order stuff ahead of time. Suppliers will work with you as far as paying them, so if you order parts right now, let’s say for, come July or August they’ll build them for you. You don’t have to pay for them until you get them, so it’s not really a big deal.
Would changing the percentage of nitro improve the life of critical parts that you guys use?
Del: I’ll let Chuck answer this one.
Chuck: In our case, we didn’t hurt a lot of parts or have a lot of engine explosions on 90%, very few. At 85% the cylinder pressure is higher and we have a lot more engine problems now. In our particular case I believe we should go back to 90%, but there’s two sides to the fence regarding that subject We’ve just had a big meeting and the whole community is split. Some racers that like it (85% nitro) and some racers than don’t like it. Personally I think it should just be a choice.
Del: I was looking back at the year 2004, before St. Louis. We had run nine or ten events by then and we had personally won three of them and Phil (Burkart) had won one and I
think we had been to another final… so five of the first ten finals and basically we had not put a connecting rod in a car for anything other than just normal life cycle of fifteen or twenty runs and piston damage was at a minimum.
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I was thinking about that and I looked back at the times we were running and they weren’t that fast, so I wonder if we were taking the same part and pushing the parts the way we do now, what kind of damage could have been there during that time? The question is, can you make them run as fast on 90% as they are now on 85% and have the engine damage go away? That I am not sure of.
