We won the 140 mph class at the Big Bend Open Road Race!

[UNGN]

Still waiting for the Results to be published, but we got a 1st place trophy so must have won.

The 140 class was unbeliveably tough this year. 4th place was within .3 seconds (60 feet) of perfect after 118 miles averaging 140 mph.

https://static1.pt-content.com/images/pt/2012/04/2-3.jpg
The Stickers cover the dents, dings and chipped paint.

https://static1.pt-content.com/images/pt/2012/04/Joels_79_Concord-1.jpg
Joel Hannig's '79 Concord (stroked 401 (426")/500 4 Speed Auto... Radared in the 160's.. Aero mods are Headlight covers, air dam and two strips of black duct tape... and a 1/2 Vinyl top to reduce lift above 150 mph (vs. the full vinyl top)

https://static1.pt-content.com/images/pt/2012/04/RobsTA_Mclaren-1.jpg
No, the Mclaren was only in the 110 mph class. It's more about looking fast with some people. Rob Walton's Orange 2002 heads/cam/6.0L TA ran in the 140 class with us.

Other cars in the 140 Class with us were a Supra, SRT8 Challenger, V-10 M5, Corvettes and '94 911 Turbo and an '03 Cobra, and 6 were previous class winners at the BBORR.

I'll post a link to the results when they get published.

[NOT A TA]

Congrats!

[rrunner68]

Very cool. Takes a lot of stones to go that fast for that long.

[SicMonte]

Dude...please pm me with info on your car!!! That is just amazing.

[Flash68]

Congrats. Stiff competition and it's crazy how close those times are.

Details of the car?

[UNGN]

Thanks for the Congrats!

We built the car back in 1998 and basically rebuilt/modified the car nearly every year since.

Its a 100K mile used car lot 1986 GP with a ZZ502 Crate Motor with a Roll cage, Fuel cell, a 6 speed, 12" BAER's and a 9" Disk Brake Versailles Rear for easier gear swaps.

Suspension with the help of SC&C is Tall Ball Joints, UCA's and hollow 36mm bar in front, and in back F2 Watts link, pro touring bar with varishocks all around. Wheels are GTA 16X8's. Alingment is about 6 deg of Caster and about -1.25 degrees camber which is nearly perfect for a high speed ORR with curves, like Big Bend.

Trans is the 3rd or 4th 6 speed... we lost count. After we broke 5th and 6th gear in the Richmond ROD last year at the BBORR, we switched to a Tremec T-56 Magnum and love it.

For cooling we have a large core support airdam (we blocked off the upper inlets in the grill for aero) and a Intrepid Dual electric fan.

Motor mods are minor and the ZZ502 is bulletproof. Carb is an 850 Double pumper... Don't try to open road race with a Vacuum secondary carb.

For 2012, we finally removed the A/C and rebuilt the heads with a 3 angle valve job and Comp Cams behive springs and that woke the car up from 5200-6000 (we have a 6000 RPM chip in the MSD).

The Secret to winning, besides luck, is lots of GPS's for Speed, average speed (90's GIII is best for this), Map (What does the road do when I fly over this blind hill) and back up GPS's for those GPS's + a Rally computer like a Timewise 747.

We measure the course to the thousanths of a mile (the Drivers front tire is a wheel on a stick) using the Rally Computer, set up check points and account for Tire growth due to speed and temperature and adjust for this in our calculations during the race.

Our system is good to +/- .5 accuracy from perfect, which used to be good enough to guarantee a trophy, but competition is so close now, we need to get our accuracy down below +/-.2 seconds to increase our odds. Then it comes down to 2 good starts, 4 good button pushes and driving what the navigator and boxes in the windshield say.

[2gofaster]

Good job. My friend Tony was in the Supra.

[UNGN]

We were having issues with our car in Sanderson turn around, so I didn't get to meet/talk to everyone in the class.

When I inspected the motor at the midpoint, the driver side was covered in oil and one of the intake manifold bolts was laying in the V. We bought some oil at the gas station and screwed the bolt back in.

On the return trip, the passenger side was covered with oil and it was down a 1/2 quart and an intake manifold bolt on THAT side was laying in the V.

Moral to the story is to make sure to use locktite on your engine manifold bolts... all were loose after the run. My dad's buddy that bolted the manifold on (after our valve job/spring swap) obviously didn't use any locktite.

[Scott Parkhurst]

Congrats Chris! I met you at Sandhills. Glad to see the car running so well.

[dropit69]

Congrats ..thats an amazing thing to be able to win !!!

[Yelcamino]

Congrats! From your description it sounds like there's quite a bit of sophistication required to go fast accurately!

[andrewb70]

Congratulations! Very impressive.

Andrew

[UNGN]

Congrats! From your description it sounds like there's quite a bit of sophistication required to go fast accurately!

When we first started OR racing, we didn't think there was much to it, either... then we started crunching the numbers in an effort to change 4th, 3rd and 2nd places into 1st places:

A normal GPS with a +/- 1 mph Average speed will result in +/- 10 seconds in a typical open road race (you'll be somewhere within 10 second).

An old Garmin III that reads out +/- .1 mph Average speed (above 100 mph, where it counts) will result in a +/- 2 second Error (you're guaranteed to be within 2 seconds).

Since they currently don't make GPS devices that read average speed above 100 mph to .01 mph acuracy, to get more acurate than +/- 2 Seconds, you need to physically measure the road and use a stopwatch at checkpoints.

A Rally computer automates the stop watching and road measuring. Our 2+2 isn't a "race car", its a finely tuned "high speed road measurment device". As long as the tire temps stay relatively constant, we can practically drive down the highway @ 140 mph and know when a mile marker is off by more than 10 feet (.002 miles)"

Once we have a factor for a given tire temp and speed we run the course and establish check points using existing physical structures, like road signs or mailboxes... stuff that race organizors won't pull up and throw away the night before the race. Measure these check points from both directions, using an approximation of the "racing line" and you can establish their location to about .002 miles... 10 feet or so.

On a course with the same start/finish lines for both legs, you adjust your miles to match their miles and you are done. On a course with different leg distances like the SORC, it becomes a math problem that makes your head hurt, because you can make the miles match for one leg, but its highly unlikely they will match the return to 3 place decimal... this is one of the reasons the SORC is so hard to win as the difference in legs from their advertised distance can result in over 2 seconds difference.

At Arnold we use "miles" going North and "normalized miles" coming south, or we'd finish 1.85 seconds too slow.

Our system came about because we wanted something as idiot proof as possible. Its hilarious to watch incar video of a navigator struggling to think as scenery is flashing by @ 165 mph with the driver pointing and cursing and there is no way we were going to split time a stop watch every mile to see where we are... stuff just flys by too fast for that. I want to drive and not have to think too much, and my Navigator, just wants to stay alive and not think too much.

We just do a hold at a known checkpoint, read the miles and if the miles are off, adjust the time accordingly.

At the BBORR, we had the tire factor so close after 118 miles, that we could have driven the course doing what the rally computer says and been .3 seconds off (that would have only been good enough for 5th place in the 140 this year), but at my final check point 5 miles before the finish told me to finish .3 seconds slow and we were off by .054 seconds (about 11 feet).

We ended up 4th overall out of 156 cars:
58978

That will be hard to top next year.

[Yelcamino]

Explaining it doesn't make it sound any easier! lol Again, congrats on a well deserved and earned win!

[Stg1Regal]

Chris

Wanted to know what style rear suspension are you using, all poly, delrin, heim joints /or articulating joints, tubular or boxed arms?

[instro84]

congrats! way to represent the g body guys

[UNGN]

Chris

Wanted to know what style rear suspension are you using, all poly, delrin, heim joints /or articulating joints, tubular or boxed arms?


We have Spherical joints in the arms with an F2 Watts link for lateral location and a pro touring Rear bar.

We were using a monster Herb adams bar with aftermarket boxed arms... which was fine for smooth surfaces, but on very rough corners near the limit, we could run out of travel due to bind. With this set up, Handling was very predictable until it wasn't, then we were just along for the ride until the suspension unloaded.

The good thing about a relatively long wheelbase is when you get snap oversteer, you can catch it before you are going down the road bacwards @ 110+ mph... which is one of the reasons our car is still in once piece after 11 years of racing it, knock on 26 year old sheet metal.

The Watts link seems to have greatly reduced, if not eliminated the snap oversteer problem we had earlier in the cars career.