Would it be fair to say that if the NHRA did away with all specs they have instituted in the past couple years they could control everything with just the rev limiter and sort of let you guys do whatever?
LB: No, because what happens is that if you allow technology to ramp up uncontrolled, it raises the operating expense. Back on the 85% issue…one of the things that came into play with 85% was the quality of the supercharger. At the time the 85% rule came in there were several supercharger companies out there. There was the PSI supercharger that was built in Arizona and there was the SSI supercharger being built in Ohio and there was another one built in Indiana or somewhere. Well, they were all pretty close. When 85% became mandatory, we started looking for the best blower possible and John Force's team went off and started building their own blowers. So they had to acquire some pretty sophisticated and expensive machinery. I'd just about bet that their superchargers put out more boost than the store bought supercharger.
So, you take that and you ask yourself, why would we allow a team to do that and then force the rest of the teams to catch up with them? They’ll all have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to catch up to where that other team is at. Now we've elevated the operating expense of the teams up, but the NHRA hasn’t increased the prize money or increased the sponsorship dollars, so I think it's important that the sanctioning body has control of the technology, but they have to have an understanding of how the economics come into play with the technology.
So what has the “supercharger wars” cost the fuel teams?
LB: Well with the 85% nitro rule you need a really great blower and those cost about $7,000. Now if you only buy the $2000-$4,000 blower that blows “X” amount of air and run it against one that pumps 30% more, you can't compete. So because of the 85% rule, you now have to have this super blower on there to compete. You didn’t need that “trick blower” with 90% because you could make the power (with nitro instead of the blower).
When we first started using nitromethane they called it the poor man's supercharger because a guy that had a blower on his car on methanol could get beat by a guy with nitro and no blower. You see that today in the sportsman category. For years those blown alcohol cars dominated and then when the A-fuel cars came in there and started running all of a sudden those were the cars to beat. How often do you see a blown Brad Anderson fat head big PSI blower beat those fuel-injected cars?
Not very much.
LB: Not very much, right. They are making power with the fuel, which is cheap compared to buying a real expensive supercharger, a pair of those fat heads that Brad Anderson sells and all those rods and pistons. If you look at all forms of racing, the more rules that the sanctioning body puts on the engine, always the higher financed teams come out on top. When they implemented the restrictor plate in NASCAR, it was very hard for teams that
didn't have a big engine development program to make their restrictor plate engines to where it was powerful enough to even qualify. When a sanction body cuts the cubic inches back from, say, 3 liters to 2.5, it's a big engine development program for the teams to try and get that 2.5-liter engine to make the same amount of power that the 3-liter engine did. So, millions of dollars gets spent to get them back to where they were.
So, having an understanding and looking back at this rule change, 85% to 90%, needs to be re-evaluated. We've run the expense of racing way up because of that decision. The operating expenses of our team, we estimate has increased due to the increased number of connecting rods and crankshafts we now consume, about $250-300,000 per year more than we spent when we were burning a 90% nitro mix. Now you take a two-car team like the Powers team and we're talking about $500-600,000 more per year for the team to compete and we’re running the same elapse times and speeds we were on 90%. That decision needs to be re-evaluated. If you can't raise the purse, figure out how to lower the operating expense.
One last question regarding the 85% rule. I’ve been told that the NHRA and specifically Graham Light is opposed to the 90% rule because he is concerned that the tuners will apply everything they’ve developed to make power at 85% to a 90% nitro load and go quicker and faster.
LB: It doesn’t matter what the percentage we have to work with is. Tuners will figure out a way to make the engines make more torque and power -- that’s what we get paid for. If we have to burn up more parts, we will. I don’t pay the bills. But I can tell you that with the rev-limiter the NHRA can control the engine rpm and speed themselves. The 90% rule allows today’s tuner not to be forced to run the engine on the edge of destruction just to be competitive. Give us a little credit for not being stupid! If we can be competitive without killing parts on every lap, we will, and I believe that changing back to 90% is the right thing to do to save all of the teams parts and stop some of the engine explosions and oil downs.
Thanks for your time, Lee.
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