"I think it could be quite a decent breakthrough just quietly," he added in what may the understatement of the decade. "As I said, it's one thing to talk about it and it's another thing to do it. Nobody ever thought we'd go out there and run 6.0s and that's probably half the story. Nobody else knows how this thing is tuned. Although the guys on the crew know what's going on, none of them are involved in the tuning of the car. I'm the only one that does the tuning so I'm the only one who really knows how the thing is running, what sort of fuel I've got at it, how we're running the clutch set-up and what have you."

Where did the name for the Inky Valve come from?

"It came from my nickname, which came from Victor. Victor will rue the day he ever called me Inky. One of his mates he grew up with and went to school with was named Ian and his nickname was Inky. I asked Victor the question after he called me Inky for about three months and he told me the story, so he seemed to think it was natural that I should be called Inky as well."

WEATHER RESISTANT

Is it likely to be as seriously weather impacted as other fuel systems?

"I don't think so. Inherently the screw blower and the PSI is less affected by weather change than any other blower. A Rootes blower, even at the best of times puts a huge amount of heat into the intake charge, so obviously if you're in good weather with a Rootes supercharger it's heating the air in the intake charge significantly. You get into humid, hot conditions with a Rootes supercharger then you take that heated intake air and you heat it up another 30 or 40 degrees and needless to say the engine won't make power because you have to take fuel out of it to deal with that lack of dense air in the manifold.

"Now the screw blower is that much more efficient - and I actually measured the difference in intake manifold temperature when we first went from the Rootes to the PSI - it was absolutely astonishing. I saw something like 70-degrees less intake air temperature with the PSI than the Rootes. So as a result, even in hot conditions, we're not super-heating the crap out of the intake air, we've still got a fairly efficient air intake charge, and I've seen Victor run 6.20s in 3000 ft of air, purely because his blower is nice and efficient."

So this valve won't be as effective with a Rootes type blower as with a screw-type blower?

"The valve would be totally useless on a Rootes blower. It's not designed for a Rootes blower and it won't work at all."

"So anybody in the States jumping up and down about it in Pro Mod is wasting his time?

"Absolutely. The Rootes blower is inherently inefficient. The efficiency of the blower falls off the further they get down the race track as it churns and churns the air making it hotter and hotter, whereas the screw blower doesn't. As a result, having run the Rootes blower on Peter's car, I can tell you, we used to get the thing in high gear and then pull three-quarters of a gallon of fuel out of the engine at that point because if you didn't it was just a rich pig. So now, the screw supercharger is the absolute opposite to that. If you don't put fuel in it as it goes down the race track you will lean the thing out. So that's cause enough for this fuel system to work and I think that's why it's been reasonably effective."

We asked again, why was it so hard to sort out the PSI on Peter's car?

"When we first went out there we had an engine that was making plenty of horsepower, we put a screw blower onto it, and it made an abundance of horsepower for the cars at that stage and that performance level. For the life of me I just couldn't get a handle on the fuel system. It was extremely difficult to tune the fuel system, plus we ran the car in a totally different way - gear ratios, clutch combination - it was all the norm back then. There was only one guy getting down the race track with a screw blower and that was Victor and he wasn't doing it very often. So if you look at the number of passes he made that were quick passes, he certainly went quick when he got the thing down there, but the rest of the passes usually ended up aborted.

(next page)