File this one under "It's a small world".
I was in Albuquerque on travel, at a subcontractor to TRW who are building
some of our flight equipment..... BF Goodrich Aerospace, Data Systems
Division.
One of the engineers at BFG, with whom I have been working for several months,
is named Brian McClung. Imagine my surprise when, after I casually mentioned
to Brian that I was planning to visit a shop in Albuquerque that does Lotus
work, he volunteered "Hey, my Dad still has the "65 Elan that he has owned
since new... and we used to have an Elan SCCA race car."
As I was standing there in amazement, across the hall from Brian, I gradually
came to realize that his Dad must be none other than... Fred McClung!
I had never actually met Dr. Fred before, but I had heard various tall tales
about his exploits, from some of the Lotus West folks such as Rod Bean and
Larry Lim. What an opportunity! I really wanted to meet him.
Anyway, to shorten a long story, the McClungs invited me over for a visit to
their house, on Saturday afternoon. We had a *grand* old time, BSing about
everything from Elan stub axle materials, to composite construction techniques
for R/C gliders, to cost / weight / efficiency trade-offs of brushless DC
motors vs induction motors. Mrs. McClung graciously whipped together goodies
for us, at the last minute. Great spaghetti!
I've been invited back the next time I go out to Albuquerque, to watch Fred
and Brian fly their custom designed, high performance, R/C soaring airplanes.
I'm lookin' forward to it.
Oh, for the record, Dr. Fred campaigned his race car in C and D production
in the early 80's, at first with Dave Bean driving national events and Fred
driving regionals. Later, Fred himself ran the runoffs at Road Atlanta a
couple years in a row (Dave Vegher won the D prod championship, with *his*
Elan, one of the years that Fred was there) and Fred was very competitive.
Rules changes effectively stifled the Elan in production classes, and Fred
left the national level SCCA game around the same time that Dave Vegher did.
Regards,
Erik Berg
PS> Had an interesting chat about C/V joints, too. More about this later.
PPS> Rod, Fred says Hi!
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