Reno Report
A missing man formation tribute was flown on Sunday for the fallen racers. Very sad to have 3 die like this. The rules were drummed into the competitors hard in hopes that Saturday and Sunday would be accident free and thankfully they were. Eternal flight to the fallen.
On a happier note, there was some great racing. Rare Bear's R3350 finally held together after all night work on it to fix damage from the day before to beat Michael Brown's Sea Fury who's R3350 did not hold together. The crowd was very happy to see the Bear back and winning.
The Mustangs were totally disappointing making just a few laps before burning pistons- again. The Mike Nixon engines, I'm sorry to say have no reliability at high power settings. These guys need to do something different than keep plugging the same old thing into their airframes. Dwight Thorne's absence is keenly felt. With telemetry, there should be some more progress in solving these problems. I say ditch the carbs, the superchargers, go EFI, turbos and give the radials some real competition. In any case, the R3350s sounded wonderful!
In Super Sport, DG's Lancair was trucked in to the event, the reduction drive was a complete bust- literally. Unfortunately the size and design of this planetary drive guaranteed its quick failure. Way too small, no torsional damper and with only 3 planet gears- well no way it was going take this level of HP. Darryl said they would continue to pursue the drive idea. They started with a geared 520 case and welded stuff to it. One wonders why they didn't use the whole 520 geared case and drive? They planned to turn the big Conti to 4400 and the prop at 3000! I'm thinking the Conti won't like that rpm level in the bottom end parts. Race 33 also sported EFI by Autronics which they were still sorting at Reno. They just did not have the development and testing time on their setup. They will be back.
I was lucky enough to assist Mike Dacey's Venture team. We found some more speed for Sunday's race through mods to the wastegate controller. He was able to pass Lynn Farnsworth's high dollar Lancair on the last lap right by start/ finish to finish third behind the two NXTs. Great to work with Mike, Cathy, Jim and Bruce. Very,very nice people. The egg is back! We'll be working over the winter to find even more speed for '08. Lots of data to pore over.
I got to meet many people there including DG, Dave Anders and our own VAF member Allan Judy. All smart and cool dudes.
Reno is awesome.
