Florida Majors

[Raceworks]

Say it puts out 5 more hp than any other engine yet is still legal? What will people say then.....

The rules don't specify a target HP. They specify what modifications are allowed. If you can manage to make a Kent squeeze out 5 extra HP and live longer than 15 minutes it's "legal" (the actual term is "compliant").

[swiftdrivr]

Actually, if I am correct it was protested, but it turned out, there was nobody available with the tools to make the appropriate evaluation. Treadway ran it in the runoffs, where a teardown [used to be ] the rule. I expect it was legal then. However, Johns had it for a while and he builds his own engines, and what Treadway did or had tells us little.
I have to agree with [the other] Jim. I race with guys who I hope are my friends, for fun. If I had a good race, and bring the toys home in one piece, I'm happy. Trophys and jackets are incidental at best. If he's cheating, he is only cheating himself. If he chooses to prove he's legal, it would do his reputation good, but that's up to John. [unless he is protested when the stewards are more prepared, I guess]

And I'd rather be watching a video of what everyone says was a great race, than arguing about John's motor.

[Lotus7]

Wasn't in FF, but at Sebring impound I was told what they wanted to check on our car, and a few minutes later asked if I could provide the gauges to check it !?!? My honest reply "no" resulted in a further 20 minutes hanging around, followed by "you're done, we don't have time to check, the next group will be here any minute". Not sure what my point is, just found the whole thing a little surreal.

[stonebridge20]

Doug, When are we getting the little guy eating popcorn emoticon?

[Hartley]

Jim Morgan has offered to pay for the protest. I say put up or shut up!

[recaryob]

Jim, I'm with you.... I was so overwhelmed with last minute issues, the one thing I left at home was my camera. I know Benson has some good footage of Saturday's action for the first part of the race until he decided to school the rest of us. Care to post?

[cooleyjb]

Who cares what they would say. It's legal.

So you're fine in what people consider a drivers class with a single engine that could make a mid pack driver at one track a winner at others?

The rules don't specify a target HP. They specify what modifications are allowed. If you can manage to make a Kent squeeze out 5 extra HP and live longer than 15 minutes it's "legal" (the actual term is "compliant").

Yes. You are correct. Follow up question. Would you think it's a good thing for the class.

[jim morgan]

For the record I did file a formal protest at Daytona last year. Officials dithered for hours about bond, then impounded my car after the race, and told me I could not leave until resolved (although there was no protest against me). So I'm not just mouthing off on Apex.

It being Sunday afternoon and my crew being held hostage I did what they wanted and withdrew protest.

Brian, after he spun on out lap I knew he would be coming through. The mid-pack restart explains why we almost came to grief, I wasn't expecting him so soon.

[jim morgan]

Generotti should have some good video.

[Swift17]

Fixing the left rear shock leak before the race ....... no camera installed UGH !

[problemchild]

Homestead was old news. The involved parties have tried to resolve their differences, and are at a point of agreeing to disagree. Its a shame that uninvolved people from thousands of miles away want to talk about Homestead instead of the great racing at Sebring.
I am fortunate to have watched the Sebring races for the past 2 years. They have been 4 outstanding races, similar to the F1600 Series events. When I hear all the whining about deficiencies in the class from other parts of the country, I have to appreciate the spirit of the SE FF racers. And John Benson ..... The guy has always been very good at Sebring, but seems to have made the transition to the radials appear seamless.
I'm excited about FF racing in 2017 and going forward. I think the East coast guys have a good handle on the class, and hope other areas realize that it all starts with participation.
You don't need the latest or greatest ..... just get out there!

[Raceworks]

So you're fine in what people consider a drivers class with a single engine that could make a mid pack driver at one track a winner at others?



Yes. You are correct. Follow up question. Would you think it's a good thing for the class.

The current rule are making a target horsepower #?

The current rule is objectively enforceable. There is an upper limit at what you can get out of an engine building it within the rules no mater how much "magic" an engine builder works. The Kents explode, the Hondas just lose power. For the Hondas, that # is, in my opinion, about 115HP. The Kents have some weird casting variables and two different heads you can run, so I peg most at around 115, a few at 117, maybe 3 in the country that are at 119. You can play games and do things out of the rulebook, but it gets really, really obvious and if you do get protested & caught SCCA will confiscate your illegal parts.


Making up a target HP # seems like a good idea until you see it in practice. I've seen a variety of amateur and pro series that dragged chassis dyno around and tried this. I remember a NASA 944 Cup race back about 12 years ago at VIR where they had the whole field (like 30 cars) lined up at a chassis dyno. Several of their classes use that mechanic (at least one of the American Iron classes and possibly Spec E30).

I think there's way too many variables and too many ways to cheat. Plus it costs a lot of money unless you happen to want to donate $50,000 to your division for a dyno plus pay somebody who knows what they're doing to run it who knows how to do atmospheric conversions properly. Plus you've got way too many variables to account for.

Wheelspin can throw the numbers off, as does the fact that the car is going to build up heat in ways it won't on track which is going to throw the dyno test off. Hondas not only have their ignition retard feature with high temperatures but they're susceptible to heat soak on the intake air charge because fuel injection doesn't cool the incoming air like a carburetor does. You can lose 2HP just because the intake air goes above 95 due to the car sitting still instead of having 130mph of cold air streaming into the intake. If I'm a sneaky bastard I can build my motor with a few extra HP and depend on heat soak to make my engine appear in spec.

What about if you have aluminum versus steel CV housings? Lightweight rotors? An aluminum diff carrier? Lighter wheels? All of these things are going to alter the HP to the wheels slightly.

Plus if you're surreptitious enough you can disable sensors before going on the dyno and possibly reduce the power for the test. I've seen all sorts of gerrymandering go on in pro series with chassis dyno tests.

Given that it's going to take you at least 10 minutes to set up and test each car you're talking quite a lot of extra time you're adding to post-race impound.

Or maybe you want to pull motors out, ship them to a water-block dyno, and test them? That becomes vastly more expensive and at that point it's probably easier to yank the head and measure things. You're certainly not going to do this on a regular basis unless your goal is to make things really, really costly. In a pro race where you have $10,000 purse for the winner or the Runoffs this may make sense, but not at a regional or Majors tour race.

In either case you've got to answer this question when you write your target HP rule: What recourse does someone have if they buy a "crate" motor and it pulls above spec HP?


A simpler option is what they do in the various spec series, which is to have a single spec sealed engine with a single designated engine builder. At least this way you can "guarantee" everyone is making the same HP (within about a 1-2 HP margin of error in an FF). The problem is either everyone has to go Honda or Kent, and in either case the engine builds will get more expensive on average. No budget racers building Kents in their garages or buying a Fit motor from a junkyard. Plus there's more labor involved in building to a target horsepower. If you build it and dyno it and it's out of the HP range you've got to tear it down & do it over again.

Even then the people with stronger credit ratings than ethics are still going to play games. The simplest thing is to just figure out how to bypass the seals and do what you want in the engine. In Formula Mazda I saw people play with fuel additives, bored-out carburetor chokes, various weird breather tanks, lightweight flywheels, lightened or limited-slip differentials, and ceramic wheel bearings as well as run unsealed motors (with or without fake seals in place). The last is what lost us a track record at an undisclosed location.


"Claimer" rules are another option: you set a value of what a "normal" engine should cost (and have a definition of what "engine" means so you're not arguing about whether the Alternator or the header goes with it) and then you can simply buy the doubtful motor your opponent has. The idea is that either A) people don't bother spending above $X because it can just get taken away or B) if they do at least said cheater motor gets swapped around every race or two.


There's basically two problems here, neither of which is going to be affected by the wording of the GCR:

First, most of us are doing this for fun. Filing a protest requires a paying a bond, a lot of intense negotiation, and you are most likely going to make an enemy who may choose to pay you back in a variety of nasty ways. Few people want to introduce those dynamics into what is for them a hobby.

Second, the officials can seem unwilling to help. But there are good reasons for this. A lot of competitors don't seem to know there's a window for mechanical protests or what the whole procedure entails (you've got to cite what specifications are broken, pay the $25 or $50 fee, and post a bond which gets returned to you if the protest is upheld or given to the protestee to pay for his car to be put back together if it isn't, then they've got to test things). If it's post-race Sunday they've usually got to vacate the track by a certain time, so that may mean finding a storage facility or somebody's garage to do the deed at. Or maybe things have to get shipped away.

They tend to be unwilling to do mandatory teardowns except at the Runoffs because A) It's hard to justify the expense to the competitor at a lower-stakes rece and B) from experience in other series I've seen how up in arms competitors will get when you tell them you're going to be pulling cylinder heads off the top 3 every race.

Let's say the officials do notice someone in FF is too fast, nobody protests, and they decide to do a teardown on their own. This is handled essentially like a protest, which means now the region has to front the bond money if they turn out to be wrong or the decision gets appealed. To paraphrase what one Steward said to me a few years ago "If you want to bankrupt a region in a hurry, start doing random teardowns." That being said I was told of one legendary case where a steward showed up to a tech shed with a stack of head gaskets.


Overall, I think the rule is fine.

My usual procedure is to make a polite suggestion to someone I think is cheating in much the same manner when I tried to creatively interpret some of the rules in my early Formula Mazda days: "You know, what you have there is the sort of thing someone might file a protest about. Here's how it ought to be." Ideally when no one else is in earshot. You're not being confrontational, you're giving them guidance on how you think it ought to be, and you're giving them constructive notice that unpleasantness may follow.

If being subtle doesn't work, I'll make a judgement call. I had a competitor in another class I knew either had a doctored motor or lightened flywheel. The guy would always take off on starts but honestly I let it slide because he was so overweight & out of shape I'd usually get past him when he got tired after a couple of laps. It usually didn't affect the big picture either way and I figured if he had a good time being a short-term nuisance for a few laps more power too him. This is club racing after all.

If it's someone who's actually good, that's another matter entirely.