"With, say, an alcohol dragster the mass you're trying to accelerate is so much lower than with a Doorslammer. The more weight you're trying to accelerate the more difficult it is to get it moving. If you've got a huge amount of horsepower and a large weight then it's a lot easier to knock the tyres off it and shake the tyres because you're still trying to accelerate that mass. They transfer weight the best way they possibly can, so they can usually glue the car to the track by mechanical means a lot better than we can. We've got an engine at the wrong end of the car, and suspension, and needless to say it required a rethink of how we applied power to the race track. That's when I started coming up with this different clutch combination that we use that allows us to get the car off the start line without overcooking the thing and not being able to put the power on the race track."

THE SECRET IS THE CLUTCH

So we got back to the clutch. While everyone is talking about this Inky Valve the secret is really the clutch and that's what's getting it down the track. This valve is letting it make horsepower and delivering fuel where it wants it, but it won't work without the clutch.

"That's entirely correct. And I'm 99 percent certain that if we gave that entire engine combination to someone and said, here you go, run it in your car they would absolutely struggle with it. That's where the breakthrough came about. This breakthrough came about 18 months ago in Peter's car but we had the Rootes blower on it at that point.

"We used to struggle to get down the track even with the Rootes blower on the car, so there was that, a couple of things in the camshaft combination which is quite critical, and the other thing is the clutch set-up in the car.

"Now, again, I really don't want to go too deeply into it. Most guys know we run something in the clutch and most guys think they know what we're doing but they probably don't know what we're doing. For instance when we went out for qualifying at Kwinana - and we've been doing this for the last 18 months - the car went a 6.23 and it wore something in the order of maybe 30-thou off the clutch. All the other guys who go out there and run these cars who run a 6.20 would be wearing two- or three-thou off the clutch. If they were to wear 30-thou off their clutch there's no way their cars would run a 6.20 because they'd be losing so much power through the drive train it wouldn't work.

"We went out and ran that 6.19 in qualifying and then came out again and the car went 6.23. On that 6.23 I underestimated the race track, I put more power in the engine and I didn't go after the clutch. We blew 45 thou off the clutch on that pass and the car still went 6.23. Most guys would be saying that's not possible, but we inherently wear 20, 25, 30, 35 off the clutch per pass. And if you watch the car going down the race track it does a lot of puking of clutch dust out of the car, but that lets us go out there with a combination of a lot of horsepower and get down just about any race track.

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