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CONTINUED
From here on in things get a little crazy. Steve decided that fuel injection was the way to go, and because of the success with his van (see the other story), it was decided that he would use a mechanical injection unit. We had an SPICA unit from an old Alpha Romeo lying around so it was torn down an modified to to supply tons of fuel, also it had to be methanol safe as that is our fuel of choice for our drag racing engines (more on methanol in a future story). To simplify things, throttlebodies from an old hillborn HEMI manifold were grafted right on to the Superflow intake manifolds and a chain drive system incorporated to drive the Spica pump.
The mass of hoses you see in the various pictures are fuel and oil. There is a 12 litre drysump tank mounted inside the car just behind the firewall. We tried various off the shelf ignition systems but we ended up using a big Magneto from a plane. Let me assure you this ignition is by far the strongest I've seen and it is driven by the same chain that the injection pump is driven from.
The car ran well in testing, but the fuel injection proved insuficient for the fuel demands of the engine. Because of this we never had a satisfactory run. The car did run a 12.00 with a forced shutdown of the engine at 3/4 the way down the track. The car was finally set up properly and ready for "the big run". After a nice burnout i staged the car and waited for the tree. Words cannot discribe the impact of great launch in a light car with this kind of horsepower. Everything was working great untill i was finishing second gear. The number three cylinder shattered at about 9000 rpm taking with it the piston, rod, crank, and chopping the block almost clean in half. Needless to say we didn't run the car the following year as it costs a considerable amount of money to build a beast like this from scratch. I keep the piston, or whats left of it on my monitor as a trophy.
CONCLUSION
Out of any bad thing comes something good. After alot of discussion as to what to build next (any new engine must be better than the last one), Steve came up with the idea to build a flat four two stroke for the race car. This as far as we know has not been been done by anyone. Steve had been toying with the idea of converting a beetle or bus engine to two stroke for quite some time and now was the time to give it a try. The new two stroke does run and we should be on the track for the 2001 season. I'll post a story on this engine when i get some pics together.
AJS.