a fuel

idle

Leaving at idle may be the killer, if everything else worked fine...

I had a transbrake issue one time right before q1 at a national. Weather was iffy, so we decided to leave at idle. Ran like a 6.01 or something (we ran 5.86 next hit with the tbrake). The car was very slow to react leaving off idle. We had a looser converter back then, and I don't think we tried it with the tighter converters.

Making it go somewhere when you step on it would be one problem. Might be really fast, but I'd say with current converters you would be a .150 player at the tree if you ripped it. Maybe you have to stage it really deep and a tighter converter?

The A/F motor makes quite a bit more torque at a much lower rpm range than a blower motor. Our torque converters were rated to be about 2 to 1 torque multiplication. Reaction time problems would come after you figure out how to get the beast off the line.

Just thinking this through, the motor will be constantly loaded when in gear...there is no clutch. You can go into neutral when stationary, but it's not as easy as pulling back on the shifter like an auto. You have to use the tbrake to stop the input shaft, go into neutral in the reverser, then tbrake, and into fwd or rev. I don't know if it would be prone to load up and kill a hole idling.

Direct drive on the converter is going to create an immense amount of heat in the fluid. The lencodrive is a shared fluid unit, so that superheated fluid might wreak havoc in the unit. I've seen the results of making a run when the transbrake plunger locked up and didn't release the brake. So thats another issue to tackle. Go price synthetic ATF at Autozone. It's not cheap. If you have to feed this thing synthetic ATF every run because it kills the fluid, will get expensive in a hurry.

Will it be cool if it works, damn right. Will it be as easy as switching from a clutch to a converter on a blown car, not no, but hell no. You will be a pioneer, but remember pioneers always have arrows in their backs.

At the end of the day if you want to race and go fast, I'd stick with the clutch. You would already be pioneering a new combo with the A/F doorslammer. This deal will be more headache than dealing with the clutch maintenance.

I'm sure it can be done, just don't know how easily it will be to get there, and how competitive it will be when you do get there.

 

Af

I'm sure if someone really sticks with it and makes some laps, it will come around. I think Monden got Wooton as quick as 4.03 or so with it. About that time he bought an A/FD and I don't think that car has been out for over a year.

Gene Snow has one in the works at Monden's shop.

With some practice, I would think you could get the clutch in and out of that thing in 30 minutes or so.

 

671

If you don't plan to chase the ADRL deal, why don't you put a nostalgia style blown nitro motor in it? I'm sure ADRL would find a spot for you....Quain talked about doing something like this a couple of years ago. Might take a bigger pump and a 44 amp mag to make it work, but this combo might work better with the converter...