"Yes, basically it's a fuel controller that is linked to engine rpm
which, to this point nothing has been. In terms of doing it electronically,
it's annoyingly simple. I could have done it in 30 seconds flat, had
electronics been allowed. But as electronics aren't I wanted to come
up with something that was purely mechanical so that at the end of the
day it's not a hybrid thing. It's not half electronic and half mechanical
because it then begs the question, is it inside the rules? I then decided
I'd go absolutely mechanical and then there can never be a question
as to whether it's a legitimate piece and within the rules?"
Isn't he concerned that someone else might "reinvent the wheel"?
"It's hard to know. There are plenty of very bright people out there
who I'm sure will do a similar thing, but, having said that, it looks
a fairly simple concept, but there are some great difficulties involved
in actually making it work. It sounds very simple but it isn't and I
put a lot of development time in in terms of what I built and how I
went about building it. The valve is part of it but it's not the total
story. To have it and not build the fuel system in a particular manner
you're really going to struggle with it.
"Victor has been running a sort of similar thing for quite a long time
(and I'm not going to get into what he runs, although I do know what
he does), but it's not the ultimate system. That's why I came up with
this system and this is probably a lot further down the track towards
being the ultimate fuel system for one of these superchargers than Victor
is running. Apart from Victor there is no one anywhere in the world
who is running a fuel system that is geared principally around the PSI
supercharger.
"Although people like Victor say they've seen inside it, they've only
seen a couple of components. They certainly haven't seen the nitty-gritty.
Victor, for example saw basically the cartridge assembly that goes inside
the body which is part of the valve assembly. He hasn't seen the individual
components of it and certainly he hasn't seen all of it. There's no
way from what he's seen that he can go out and construct it.
"We're yet to see exactly what it's capable of, but I honestly think,
having seen what I've seen with the passes we've made with the car,
dependant on what we can do with the car and how well we can make the
car work, I think it's going to run 5.80's.
"I mean, when you go and you run a .14 and then you take another tenth
off it and it does it so easily and it's nothing like flat out - that's
what it comes down to, it's doing it exceptionally easily. The hat we're
running on the car is still the original low port Funny Car hat. If
you were to run a Davenport plate under that hat, which a lot of the
Funny Car guys ended up doing, they're worth around 300 horsepower extra.
And then the deep throat hat which Victor runs and the guys with the
dragsters, they're probably worth another couple of hundred horsepower
over and above that. So we've probably got another four or five hundred
horsepower just by bolting another hat on. And at the moment the engine
is not working anywhere near flat out, so I'm amazed by the whole thing.
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