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Old September 8th 2018, 01:49
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Steve C Steve C is offline
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Join Date: Sep 2002
Location: Sydney, Australia
Posts: 1,757
Hi

The 1/4 mile go trained out, I will try again to have run in few weeks.

I wrote an article for club magazine about the event

½ Mile racing at Gunnedah Airport
On the 1st of September I ran my Beetle at the Race Revolution ½ mile at Gunnedah Airport , I had previously run a similar event at Cooma Airport over 1000 metres in 2014 and 2015. Cooma Airport didn’t want to have the event held there anymore so the organisers had to find a new venue. The new ½ mile distance was chosen as it’s an international distance used by other land speed racing bodies and Gunnedah Airport didn’t have the required slow down area at the end of the racing surface for 1000 metre racing.

I’ve had a few issues with my Beetle like running into walls and breaking motors but I managed to get it running in time to run at Gunnedah. While it was off the road the Subaru WRX STI (EJ207) motor was bored and stroked to 2165cc and made 305 kW at the wheels when tuned by DVS on the Central Coast at Somersby. Because the motor is turbo charged it had to run in the classic class 2D for vehicles between 3000cc and 5000cc.

Gunnedah like the rest of NSW is in severe drought so it was good to travel there and spend some money in local businesses; some businesses that sell alcohol received a fair bit of my money. The event organisers nominated a local charity “drought relief for kid’s fundraiser”, many racers including myself donated to this cause.

So after spending lots of time putting my Beetle back together I also had to finish putting my car trailer back together which I had taken off the road to refurbish. We left Friday morning for the drive up to Gunnedah towing an untested car trailer, good planning and workmanship prevailed and we arrived to a very wet Gunnedah airport, a friend of mine Andrew who is also a heretic and drives a Subaru powered 71 Fastback travelled up with us, we met up with another VW racer Glenn Torrens in his salt racing L bug (1303S). After having the car scrutineered we went and checked into our accommodation and then went into town for some refreshments.

Saturday, race day was fine and was ideal for racing with light winds all day. I have an Adaptronic Modular ECU in my car which not only controls fuel, reads and adjusts tune according to E85 concentration and ignition but can be used to operate launch control. On my first run with launch control activated I rolled up to the start line, put my foot down flat and the car went to 5,000 rpm and made 2 psi boost, as the car moved forward the launch control disengages via signal from a speed sensor in the transmission and full RPM can be achieved which on this day was set at 7,300 RPM. I got a bit exited and fried my clutch, I came back into the pits and was going to put the car on the trailer but my son convinced me to let it cool off and give it another run without launch control.

After everything cooled off I was able to do 4 more runs taking it easy and win my class and finished 37 out of 80 cars, best run was at 231 kph and 19.5407 seconds.

The runway at Gunnedah is very bumpy near the end, I think I’m going to look at some front aero, it was getting a bit hairy at about the 700 metre mark and the car squatted the rear the whole length of the track even with short 30 mm torsion bars. I ran the car on 15 inch Porsche Cookie cutter wheels with street tyres on the front but Mickey Thompson ET Street drag tyres on the rear, I normally run on 18 inch Porsche wheels so the car sat a lot lower than normal, I also fitted a V Force whale tail to the car for the event.

I put a new radiator in the week before the event after it got a little warm driving back from the VW Spectacular, it worked perfectly, I used one from a 944 Porsche, really nice fit, thanks to the boys at Westside Mufflers, a VW Nationals sponsor for helping out again with welding fan mounts to the radiator and turning my stupid ideas into metal once again.

I have an intercooler temp gauge in the car which shows in and out temperatures, I was able to keep an eye on intake temps, I use a Frozen Boost ice box which I fill with ice and I short circuited it to cut out the front mounted radiator which I run on the street to cool the PWR water to air intercooler, at the finish line my intake temps were 90c after the turbo and 22c after the inter cooler, I was leaving the line with after inter cooler temps of around 18c and there was still ice in the system after the run.

So I’m going to get hold of a front air dam, put a larger rear housing on my GTX3076 turbo as I went from a .82 to .63 rear housing trying get some better response when it was a 2 litre motor so I will go back to a .82 rear housing and go for some more killer wasps and of course I will see what I can do about a clutch, the Aussie dollar has gone south against the greenback so I will try something local if not I will see what Kennedy Engineering who supplied my current clutch can do.

So as far as I’m aware I hold the ½ mile land speed record for an under 5000cc Beetle in Australia

Steve
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File Type: jpg steve at Gunnedah.jpg (75.5 KB, 22 views)
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