It's a lot scarier when you see things going under load at speed. Lots of wiggling, twisty magic, waves.
Smokey Yunick (blessed be his name) used to make see-through timing covers, oil pans, valve covers + strobe light + some sort of oscilloscope setup to watch the craziness. I think I remember seeing the results for small block Chevrolet timing gears on sprint car engines as the teeth wiggled more and more with rpm. Cam went backwards and forwards. Ooof.
Oh, man. I'm not a huge NASCAR fan, but that guy. That guy. He was an absolute master of "But the rules didn't say I couldn't..." and probably is responsible for half the thickness of the modern rulebook on his own!
"What? The fuel tank capacity can't have an inflated basketball in it that springs a leak during the race, leaving us with more fuel capacity?"
"What? The fuel lines have to be a short path between the tank and engine? Now, look, nowhere in this here book does it say I can't stuff the frame rails with a couple hundred feet of spiraled fuel line. It gets an extra gallon or two in the car? Really? Huh..."
"Nowhere in the book does it say the bodywork has to actually match the size or positioning of the stock car the race car is based on. I can't help it if nobody else has totally redone the bodywork to improve aerodynamics... oh, OK, you're bringing cardboard templates next season, got it, that trick is done."
The guy was an absolute master of "creative advantages that weren't actually illegal at the time they were used."
The aero belly of his 1968 Camaro was interesting. The SBC-powered Indy car (probably the last of home-garage built vehicles for that race), the time he drove a NASCAR car back from an impound without the gas tank, etc.
Not to say that cheating didn't happen elsewhere. Check out the front-end sheet metal of the Trans-Am Boss 302s. Use of the headlight holes for brake ducting. The inline Autolite carb. There were some good minds at Holman-Moody, Kar Kraft, Bud Moore, etc.
Fuel tank capacity is required to be 10 gallons. Say, 20 laps or so.
They check, at the tech inspection, that your tank doesn't hold more than 10 gallons. Great.
Except, once you deflate the basketball (or get creative with routing fuel lines all over the car), you actually have 11-12 gallons onboard.
Which means, at the end of the race, when everyone else has to pit, you can make the "risky option" to skip the final pit stop, keep rolling, and, well, surprise of surprise, make it over the line (in first place) before you flame out.
Your fuel tank was only allowed to hold a certain amount of fuel because if you had more, you could go farther between pit stops, thereby covering more laps while the other drivers were stopped for gas.
He would temporarily meet the small tank regulations during inspection, but under race conditions, the ball would burst, allowing for more space in the tank, which would get filled up with more fuel than his competitors at the first pit stop.
I would assume that by some point, if one of his cars won, the officials just took the whole thing apart to find out what sort of bizarre loophole he'd found that met the letter of the requirements while totally violating the spirit. His antics weren't secret, even at the time he was working. He was just really good at it.
Nope ; Motorsport is always drivers' skills coupled with engineering ingenuity. It's always about "what can I come up with, which gives me an edge, and still somehow is within the rules?" I don't know anything about Nascar, but the history of Formula 1 is full of such little tricks as well. It's just easier to regulate "other sports" than it is to regulate sports that come coupled with a lot of technological involvement.
If sth gives you an edge for half a season until rules are adjusted, that might be enough to win a championship. It's a cat-and-mouse game, but it's also exciting, and important for the whole thrill of it.
Decades past Gordon Murray designed a fan quite literally sucking cars to the ground, which somehow was within regulations, because no one even considered something like that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hb6DAmm7sZg In rally driving, they would sometimes come up with fake reasons for a start to be delayed, so they wouldn't have to drive in the front car's dust all the time. Audi entering with their 4-wheel car back in the days was only possible, because they pushed for a rule change and no one else really knew what was coming. Sometimes manufacturers straight up "cheated" (almost, sometimes for real) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lo4dGTrzr8 ; it's a thin line, but also what makes it exciting.
I would say that it's the hacker's / engineering ethos almost. What can I do within the framework? Whether it's building a bridge (to make it more stable while still following this brash design), a road car (how can I create something fun, with torque, sound, emotion, down force, power, but a nice shape, and still get a road legal car within environmental regulations), computer games (consider https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izxXGuVL21o ; computer games are full of hacks to get the most out of the hardware), even legal (how can we pay almost no taxes, while not being busted for tax avoidance?) ; not every ingenuity is necessarily good, but it will always be cat-and-mouse, that's the point of living.
This got meta quick ... and quite a more detailed answer than I anticipated. Sorry for that, hope I gave you a different perspective though.
> Decades past Gordon Murray designed a fan quite literally sucking cars to the ground
This reminds me of a similar story (and I'm having trouble finding a source now, perhaps it was the Lotus 78?), where the team bragged to the press about a new technology they had developed which reduced the losses in their differential, which explained their recent competitive advantage. On race day the pit crew even covered the part in rags as they ran to the back of the car to swap out the differential mid-race, lest their competitors catch a glimpse of this new technology.
Only there was no fancy differential technology. That was all a ruse to distract from the aerodynamic skirt they were using which literally sucked the car onto the track :)
Was watching the formula 1 series, and one team appeared to fully copy the body stylings of the mercedes team, and while it was technically legal, it was morally frowned on and a lot of other teams were pissed off.
People do, that's why the rules are changed after a while. Competitors are usually outraged. Fans are somewhat split. Rulemakers are annoyed, but don't retroactively change the rules.
No. You're free to abide by a conservative interpretation of the rules, it just means you'll literally never win against a team with a more creative interpretation. It's very much of a realm of "That which is not explicitly forbidden is permitted." And the range of "explicitly forbidden" tends to be based heavily on what the rules body feels offers too much advantage.
It's quite literally a major part of what makes the sport interesting. Yes, driver skill matters, but an exceedingly creative crew chief (see Smokey) is worth quite a bit more.
Some of it is certainly "cheating, good luck catching us." Some of the trick throttle body restrictor plates that look like a perfectly valid restrictor plate ("A hole of X diameter to restrict airflow to the engine so everyone has the same power") end up flowing a lot more are pretty clearly cheating - they're against both the letter and spirit of the rules, but you have to catch them, which is hard.
Others? It's literally just undefined areas. To borrow a few of Smokey's antics, sure, the car has to be based on a stock car you can buy - but does it have to be dimensionally identical, or can you get creative? He did things like create smoother windshield/frame junctions to reduce drag, extended the bumper down to improve aerodynamics, etc. Is that cheating, or is that just creative optimization within the rules? You were, at one point, allowed to use an alternative frame for the car. As worded, that doesn't prohibit a custom made frame with the drivetrain offset to one side for balance improvements for circle track duty... but is that actually cheating? It never said you couldn't.
One might reasonably assume that a fuel line routing would be "a more or less direct and protected path from the fuel tank to the engine." But, if you've not specified this, and someone stuffs the frame rails with a couple gallons worth of spiraled fuel line... the requirements specify fuel tank capacity. They don't specify fuel line length or capacity. So if you stuff a ton of the largest diameter fuel line you can get your hands on in just about every frame rail and it doesn't say you can't... well, is that cheating?
The rules have gotten more strict over time, but there are still plenty of creative ways to use the provided parts. A few years back, some team found some way to use the provided suspension components, within spec, to meet the ride height requirements at the start of the race, when it was measured. They were consistently lower than they ought to be at the end of the race, but they used the provided parts and met the requirements, as written, at the time they were racing. I believe the letter they got was essentially, "We can't figure out what you're doing, but stop it, and we're going to start checking ride height at the end of the race, here's the tolerances." They met every requirement provided, but found some way or another to get an advantage.
And that's just NASCAR. You get into F1 with "functionally unlimited budgets" and some of the engineering insanity that is entirely within the bounds of the rulebook, but is still wonderfully absurd...
Stuff like "You never said we had to race with the physical engine we qualified with, so our qualifying engine is run at the literal edge of holding together and we replace it before the race." I believe it was BMW that got around 1500hp out of a 1.5L motor (so 1000 HP/L), but the engine more or less came apart at the end of the qualifying laps.
Can you water cool your brakes? Well, OK, nothing against it. Whoops, did you water cool your brakes so much you're underweight during the race, but refill the tank before post-race weigh in? Well...
Far as I'm concerned, this is the sort of thing that makes racing interesting!
The same ethos added to pro cycling is pretty much considered cheating but I’d guess not in the inner chambers. Fair game as long as you pass the tests? Draw oxygenated blood out and put it back in halfway through a tour. Now that’s called blood doping. Rinse and repeat, for decades:
I assume the rule book specified a maximum fuel tank size, to ensure that teams were making roughly equal pit stops for refueling, etc. Installing a larger fuel tank with the volume taken up by an adjustable air reservoir means the tank starts at legal capacity, and increases in capacity after the race begins, allowing fewer stops for refueling.
When you qualify, your fuel tank is only allowed to hold X gallons. With the basketball inside, it held X gallons.
When the basketball sprang a leak and deflated, the tank held X+Y gallons, netting a slight advantage between pit stops (an extra lap or two over 500 miles adds up)
Reciprocating machines are fairly remarkable when you consider all of the components involved, forces, etc. Even more so when you think about how long a typical car engine lasts.
These incredible forces are why rotary and turbine engines are substantially more reliable. Some gas turbines have only 1 moving part, and in some applications this moving part experiences zero wear due to magnetic/aerodynamic/active bearings.
Rotaries are a funny case. Look good on paper. Thermal efficiency issues. Smog. Seals. Noise control difficulties. Weird patches like bridge ports.
For modern passenger cars, it's kind of like overcoming the difficulties of two-stroke.
In anti-defense of 4-stroke ICE, it seems to me like we are hitting peak wacky complexity of those. Variable timing cams, turn off the cylinders, direct port injection, turbos, variable intake, complicated ECU. It's a far cry from a flathead 6 or VW flat 4.
Thank God electric cars are becoming more available, although I fear increasingly complex cooling and battery management and the 1000 things a software guy is going to add to them.
> Thank God electric cars are becoming more available, although I fear increasingly complex cooling and battery management and the 1000 things a software guy is going to add to them.
I'm hoping lithium iron phosphate starts to be used more in midrange vehicles; partly because they can be scaled up while sidestepping the potential resource bottlenecks around cobalt and nickel, and partly because they're very durable and cooling isn't usually much of an issue. Though heating might be an issue in the winter time (most LFP cells don't like being charged when temperatures are below freezing; heating might be necessary in winter).
Like those distorted maps of the united states weighted by population[1], your post should be read with "environmental compliance" as the center of mass. Yet you shrug it off like a footnote. Nobody, except perhaps ship designers, cares who has the biggest piston engines.
And what has happened since then? Google is showing me several engines with breakthrough efficiency in the last 10 years.
When I was a kid in the 90s, SUVs commonly got 12 MPG. The new models are 25 sometimes 30 MPG. Emissions have gotten considerably better in the last 30 years.
I’m looking and can’t find any info to back up the claim that this 1920s engine was more efficient than engines designed in the 80s and 90s. I am curious about it, not just is it true, but specifically what kind of efficiency you mean and what design features made it efficient. Do you have any sources or reading? Wikipedia talks about how the arrangement of the valves increased the efficiency, but only says this made it approach four stroke efficiency (at the time), not that it exceeded other designs. The 204 was a two stroke, and it seems to be common knowledge that even today, four strokes are more efficient. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junkers_Jumo_204
I've own an RX8 maintenance came down to adding oil every few fill ups, and changing spark plugs every 10k miles. If you treat the engine correctly, the will easily get to 100k miles, if you drive the engine incorrectly (run at low RPM), or run low on oil things won't last long. The car is a sports car and won't get you worry free 200,000 miles like Accord or Camry. Even the S2000 had similar oil usage.
Talking to the dealers I took the car too, many of the issues with related to people who didn't warm engine up, or baby the engine below 3,000 rpms causing carbon build up.
Kevin Cameron from Cycle World has written some of the most fantastic articles about these topics, in particular there's one that I'm struggling to find about the problems with solid camshaft mass when rpms started to get really high and resulted in cam oscillation and failure, so they were made hollow, only to then discover they got too hot, which led to making the sodium filled, and on and on.
Also a couple of great ones about the struggle to find alloys for radial engine cylinders that could flex without cracking. His writing is so insightful and concise!
We had a see through engine w/strobe system at the uni I studied vehicle engineering at, it was really really educational to be able to adjust ignition timing and fuel mixture and see how it would change the color & shape of the flame front.
Probably a ton easier to simulate it these days but at the time it was absolute magic and really helped me understand how to ear-tune an engine to at least good enough to get on a dyno.
i just got a driveshaft balanced for my 240z, it was 2/3oz out on the front and 1/3oz out on the tail. I was thinking how much force would that generate at speed.
Smokey Yunick (blessed be his name) used to make see-through timing covers, oil pans, valve covers + strobe light + some sort of oscilloscope setup to watch the craziness. I think I remember seeing the results for small block Chevrolet timing gears on sprint car engines as the teeth wiggled more and more with rpm. Cam went backwards and forwards. Ooof.