SCC Technical Assistance Program - August 2002
This was the definitive embodiment of SCC's technical expertise and mentality. Back in the day, when drag racing was all the hype and timeslips were the measure of a man and his car, we found the best way to illustrate what we've preached all along. Less is better, lighter is faster. We faked a letter from a reader asking how to make his big-wheeled, massive body-kitted car faster in the quarter-mile. With the help of Steve Mitchell (at the time with Nissan North America), Nissan PR man Dean Case, a Sentra destined for the crusher and a Milwaukee Sawzall, we set out to find the best solution for free speed. Ah, the good old days.
Making It Stick -June 2005- February 2007
In all of our enthusiasm for cornering fast, no one ever really took the time to explain some of the basics of suspension voodoo. And no self-proclaimed geek could ask without the risk of sounding like an idiot. The Making It Stick series was the solution. This entire series of brain dumps starts at the fundamental level with concepts like roll, pitch, spring rate and the effects of alignment, and continues to more advanced topics like instant centers, anti-squat and dive, and the breakdown on the elusive dampers. Short of reading a textbook and spending years at the track, the five-part Making It Stick series can arm a reader with enough knowledge to have at least a semi-intelligent conversation with a suspension engineer. It's also filled with detailed diagrams that help the geometrically challenged to visualize what a roll center is, something no textbook ever bothered with.
Suck, Squish, Bang, Blow - August 1999 - May 2003
This 12-part series is the mother of all primers when it comes to engines. It covers everything from engine basics, header design, cams and head porting to multiple parts on turbochargers, turbo sizing, nitrous and superchargers. Reading and understanding this entire series was by far the cheapest way to learn about engines, tuning and making power short of the hands-on, blow-it-up-a-couple-times, do-it-yourself hard way. When you can understand the entire series, you've graduated from the ranks of automotive peon. We still use it as a reference from time to time. If you want to know the hows and whys of something working, instead of just what something is, this has enough to keep your head spinning.
Power In A Bottle - July 2005
After years of listening to racers, dyno groupies and forum monkeys argue over the effects of octane and how to increase it, we took matters into our own hands to settle the matter. And with a federally certified independent test lab, no less. We added two off-the-shelf octane boosters as well as a home-brew mix to some randomly sampled pump gas and tested them against each other, on a combustion fuel research engine, the way the government does. In the end, we found just how far octane boosters could go against real race gas and talked about some of the background theory of gas and octane.
What's Wrong With Your Dyno? - August 2004
We've always known that each type of chassis dynamometer measured power differently. But few have ever taken on the task of back-to-back testing each dyno in common use with the same car-or truck, in our case. To be scientific, we got the dumbest fuel-injected vehicle we could find, a 4.0-liter Ford Ranger, and ran it in two-wheel drive and four-wheel drive modes on our standard Dynojet, HKS' Dynojet, Maha, Dyno Dynamics, Dynapack and DTS chassis dynos. We weren't dumb enough to try and come up with some conversion factor for each dyno (since it doesn't work that way,) but the data collected did show how each dyno worked and performed against the others.