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18th November 2007, 12:29 PM
#1
V8 Sprint Cars - the ones with the huge wing on top
I went to a Sprint Car night last night (out behind the Adelaide "International" Raceway) with a mate who works for the main sponsor of the event.
Those guys are insane!
160 Km/h on this little circuit with methanol fumes and dust everywhere, mostly in a sideways fashion. What a hoot that would be.
Last time I went to anything like that was when I was about 10, with my dad. Lots of families and kids there - was really impressed by the crowd numbers for a pretty obscure form of motor sport.
My mate's companies car lost an oil seal in its first outing (filter was loose they think) which was very impressive with smoke everywhere. Then in its second race it threw a rod! $20,000 worth of damage to the engine. That, after they had just spent $9000 the previous week doing up the engine. Bad night at the office I guess.
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18th November 2007, 12:59 PM
#2
I used to be involved with the mini sprints, 2/3s the size of their big brothers and run no bigger than 1.2 ltr engines, no fuel injection, no forced induction.
Most were direct drive but my mates was a volvo 4spd with 3rd and 4th removed for weight purposes.
complete and full of fuel and Dean in the seat it weighed in at around 440kg and had near on 120hp running sidedraft webers and on methanol.
His next door neibour at the time ran a sprint car, Matt Reed (I ran into the other day out of the blue) who probably ran on the tightest budget of any of the field yet was very competative.
We used to go all the time but havnt been for about 5 years now.
I'd love to do the whole easter trail one year as before Ive only been to Avalon and Warnambull on the trail.
It's a great motor sport to be involved in and the G forces that these blokes cop are when racing about the same as an F1 driver would and when they crash they can pull huge G forces yet very few these days actually get hurt.
They are the strongest little cars around and even when they look completely trashed they are amazingly rebulidable out of the back of a truck and they have more adjustments than you could imagine.
Adjustments such as increasing the track length by up to 1 1/2" to hook it up for greasy tracks and shorten it for hooky tracks.
Then you have the torsion bar or spring adjustments, front beam track adjustment, then changing tyre diameters for tighter/wider tracks or sandy/loamy tracks and then tyre pressures.
They are great to watch and even better to be involved with.
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18th November 2007, 08:43 PM
#3
Fast you say.......
Try steering one at full noise....
i was a young tacker once and got the chance to drive one a very short distance around a wheat property in the mallee. It was insane..... Rodec Small block...
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27th November 2007, 06:35 PM
#4
They are fun aren't they!
I can recall World F1 GP Champion, Jackie Stewart, saying after a quest ride in a Sprinter in Sydney.
"There is nothing so terrifying as a Sprint car at full noise".
Says it all really.
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27th November 2007, 07:23 PM
#5
Yep used to love going to the speedway as a kid, we would pick up a beer cartoon and tear a hole in it so we could than go sit right on the fence on the tightest corner and get covered in mud
Had a ball
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