After hearing about Nicky Notch’s personal best yesterday, I stopped at his pit area this to find out more about what makes his program go. “I do it all myself, from tuning to engine building,” he says, “along with help from Santhuff and Greg Slack Converters.” In fact, Yancey from Santhuff is here helping him this weekend as his normal crew chief, girlfriend Amanda, had to stay home. “Trying to keep up with the guys with big budgets is tough, especially with limited vacation time.” Nicky lost a pair of cars in a fire a few years ago, and in the time it took him to rebuild, the technology advanced so much it’s been tough for him to catch up. That said, he’s finally more than happy with how the car is performing now. Stout efforts from a small-budget crew.
After talking with Nicky, I wandered down the row, and when I saw Mark Biddle of Panhandle Performance in Sean Lyon’s trailer I popped my head in to say hello. It was fitting for me to end up there, as Biddle was poring over the data from the team’s MoTec engine management system, we ended up in a long conversation about racing technology, and he showed me quite a bit of the data he was looking at after the team’s run last night. One of the most interesting things to me about how much small-tire radial racing has advanced over the last several years is how much the engine, turbo- (or supercharger), or nitrous system don’t really matter to the ultimate performance level of the cars. They are scienced out enough to this point that Biddle says it doesn’t matter nearly as much whether there is a cast or sheetmetal intake or huge-port cylinder head—it’s about the size of the power-adder and how the tuner manages the power to obtain results on the track.
As I stood and talked with Mark and he explained to me what they were doing with their combination, I was blown away at just how much data they were recording; they have dozens of sensors measuring many parameters that might not typically be considered critical. With the knowledge in hand to interpret it properly, a tuner could manage a car for not only performance, but also incredible reliability, and as an aside, safety. For example, one of the things they are measuring is the angle of a wheelstand, in order to better control what the car is doing and save a potentially bad run to make the car more consistent. When the team first started building this car several years ago, they enlisted Shane Tecklenburg to work with the MoTec system to help them build the most state-of-the-art car possible, and after lengthy discussions, settled on the company’s M1 engine management system. This system is fully configurable to allow the measurement of any piece of data for which there is a sensor. Along with Shane’s assistance, they are constantly refining the package to deliver the results they are looking for. It offers boost control, ignition, datalogging, and so much flexibility that it took the team a long time to learn how to interpret what they were looking at and how it related to the car’s performance.
For the first several years, they struggled to make it work—and even doubted their decision to use it—but stayed the course and are finally having success with it. Interestingly, Biddle says that the transmission and torque converter technology play the biggest part in getting the car to perform. They recently switched to a two-speed transmission and converter from Mark Micke at M&M, and Biddle says that the data they uncovered with the EMS led them in the direction that the inconsistencies they were seeing on the track ware due to an issue with the transmission combination they were running previously. It was an amazing conversation, and while I wish I could share all of the details of it with you, I think Mark would be quite upset with me if I did. They say that knowledge is power, and after seeing firsthand just how much knowledge is available to the savvy tuner, I’d have to agree.