Non-Volvo car chat megathread

[BlackBart]

It's very very fast. It still exists. See the three little lights at the forward edge of the door? Those light up to tell other cars on the track at night that you're either 1, 2, or 3 in your class.

[BlackBart]

Lets go back 30 or 35 years from there...

This is the underside of the Ferrari 250 chassis. Made one by one. Pretty basic, welded tubes and rectangles. Note the upside down V12 block for fitting. Note the exhaust is already fitted, they just need to connect the header downpipes.

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[BlackBart]

The gang's all here!

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[matthew1]

What a sweet group of cars.

[BlackBart]

In 1967, a kid in the neighborhood came flying up on his stingray yelling “Parnelli Jones Indy car is at the Firestone store!!”

We didn’t really know from Parnelli Jones at nine years old, but we knew Indy and STP and Andy Granatelli, so we all jumped on our bikes and whipped down there.

They had it on a display trailer, and were dragging it around the US to big Firestone stores as a promotion. Bright red. Bulbous, smooth, short. Coolest thing we had ever seen. Helicopter turbine powered. We didn’t know what a turbine was, we knew nothing about what a spaceship it was, we just wanted a stack of STP stickers!

Driver hanging off the side like the cockpit pod on the Millennium Falcon! Look at the zero protection for the driver - couple of steel tubes.

They quickly made up reasons to ban it.

Made very little noise - just the whine. It had an air brake. Four wheel drive no less.

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And those coveralls, WOOT!

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[matthew1]

Damn interesting! That was in the days where everything wasn't homogenized to meaningless nothingness.

I went to a handful of NASCAR races 2000-2008, all the Las Vegas 400, but I just couldn't get into it. It didn't "stick". They're all the same car.

[volvolugnut]

If you can find the book "They call me Mister 500" by Andy Granatelli read it. it is a very interesting read. His early life was very wild. He and his brother started out collecting pop bottles for the return fee.
volvolugnut

[BlackBart]

I've never seen that book - thanks.

I believe that car took over two years to develop and build. It was a sensation. It was fast, and the four wheel drive made it stable in corners. It was running away with the race until a $5 transmission bearing failed in the last few laps, essentially putting it in neutral.

USAC quickly decided that an Indy car must have pistons and make a lot of noise, so it was banned. All that investment and engineering wasted. There was a lot of heartburn in the early 60's when the rear-engined chassis' started to replace the old roadsters, but this was just too much for them.

[BlackBart]

I did some more reading on this car.

Designed by Barnes Wallace, a British engineer who helped design the "bouncing bomb" in WWII. Dan Gurney and Carroll Shelby both turned him down. Many modifications by Andy Granatelli, including the side-by-side design. It had a fabricated aluminum box spine chassis, which warped during heat treating and they had to start over, missing the 1966 race.

Advanced inboard springs with lever arms. It had the Ferguson four wheel drive system. It had a torque converter and no gears to transfer shaft power to the driveline. The idle was so high you'd just lift off the brake and it would roll away. It had a 3 second throttle lag (I think that's why the airbrake - you could bleed off speed without the turbine unspooling). The turbine they used became the most popular small plane turboprop engine for many years.

USAC first severely restricted the area of intake air, which reduced the amount of power it could produce. The next year they restricted it to the point it could barely keep up with state of the art piston engines at Indy. They subsequently banned it outright, although Lotus tried it in an F1 car for a short time.

[matthew1]

BB, are you a fan of Can-Am cars? I am, though I don't think I've ever seen one in person .

Can-Am started out as a race series for group 7 sports racers with two races in Canada (Can) and four races in the United States of America (Am). The series was initially sponsored by Johnson Wax. The series was governed by rules called out under the FIA group 7 category with unrestricted engine capacity and few other technical restrictions.

The group 7 category was essentially a Formula Libre for sports cars; the regulations were minimal and permitted unlimited engine sizes (and allowed turbocharging and supercharging), virtually unrestricted aerodynamics, and were as close as any major international racing series ever got to have an "anything goes" policy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Can-Am


Parnelli Jones raced in it.