Jeff Winchell said,
<...who had the best 5 events in the country last year.
1 John Ames Corvette SS 497.35
2 Sam Strano Camaro FS/ESP 496.36
3 Steve O'Blenes RX-7 BP 496.22
4 Bill Beutow Corvette BSP 496.06
5 Bob Tunnell M3 BSP 495.52
6 Erik Strelneiks Corvette SS 495.13
7 Gary Thomason Corvette ASP 495.11
8 Mike Johnson Camaro FS 494.33
9 Tom Harrington Kart F125 494.12
10 Doug Newhard MR2 ES 493.94
P.S. Tom Berry in an ESP Camaro missed making it a clean sweep of fast
cars by
.02 points by being a nice guy to his co-driver/car owner. :-)
Looking at the cars and classes, it seems the fastest drivers drive fast
cars.>
Was it Coolidge who talked about liars, damned liars, and statisticians? :))
I'm a big fan of overanalyzing results too. In this case I'd say that this
could also be taken as a comment on the indexing system. If it tends to place
these cars closer to the top (negative handicapping) then this pushes the
faster classes to the top 10. Obviously in either case these drivers are very
fast and very consistent.
But: if it's only "fast" you're tracking, what about the A Mods? What is
preventing someone with a slower car from getting the same percentage of its
maximum out of it consistently? If they're just as talented, but not on this
list it would seem that the index is at fault.
OTOH, maybe it's just saying that people who have gotten really good at
National-level autocrossing, who typically would have large investments in time
and travel already, also enjoy driving high performance machinery, and more
importantly can afford it.
Wow, as far as the CO2/cold packing is concerned, I thought that there was
something against that in the Solo rules, but if you all don't know it then I'm
probably wrong. Which would you rather cool? If you have a choice, make it
the air.
-The gas is only mixing as one pound per 14.7 pounds of the air, if you work
out the proportions then cooling gasoline isn't nearly as effective in cooling
the total charge.
-Efficient combustion takes complete evaporation of the gasoline - liquid gas
does not burn! Supercooling it will retard evaporation. Fine atomization at
the injectors only goes so far, increasing surface area to enhance that
evaporation.
-Also, the closest information that I could find on cold gasoline is that
aviation gas, which is fairly closely related to auto gas, has a specified
maximum freezing point of -72 F. If your cold can gets the gasoline to dry ice
(-106 F) temps it will have a good chance of turning to molasses. If it gets
cool enough to really change its viscosity then your jets/injectors will be out
of their calibrated ranges, probably costing you all that HP.
-Gas doesn't get much denser with cooling, the air does, so you'll get much
more air to combust if you cool the air.
-And if you're drawing air from your engine compartment, all that CO2 from the
dry ice will be mixing with the air, diluting your mix and robbing power.
But I fully expect to see Andy with a cool can around the water sprayer, icing
down his Azenis tires between runs at the next event! ;-)
PaulT
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