"So that's another part of the game. The fact that we wear the clutch out of it, but that's not where it's at. Where it's at is other guys can go out and do the same thing. If they wanted to run their clutch in a similar way to us then they can do that, they can blow all that clutch off and probably get down race tracks with a powerful combination, but they would only do that for the one pass because when they come back for the second pass, if you punish the clutch that much, all the build up of materials you get on the floaters and the steels and what have you, and it tears the surface a lot, if you go out with that same clutch in the car it's like having 20 percent more clutch in the car without changing anything. So the next pass they've got too much clutch in the car and it'll shake the tyres and blow the tyres off, whereas the clutch we run won't do that.

"The clutch stays in the car all race meeting and the floaters in the clutch which I've manufactured have now done over one hundred passes and they've only been reground once."

And they're not building up too much heat?

"We build up as much heat as we possibly can."

Is that part of it? Is it desirable?

"No, it's not necessarily desirable, but it just doesn't make any difference to it. It doesn't matter what you do in terms of heat build-up. The floaters can come out black, blue, scored, it just doesn't make any difference to them."

IT LOOKS NORMAL, BUT . . .

Everyone can see the Inky Valve sitting there on the side of the engine, but if it ever came to pulling the clutch apart in the pits surely it would be a give away.

"I had the clutch apart at Kwinana and Brett Stevens walked past and the floaters were hanging up on the parts washer and the pressure plate was sitting in the parts washer and he was looking at everything. He said he knew we were using something different and he told us he's already been through all that and he knows that you've got to do this and that, which, as it happened was the opposite of what he needed to be doing (but I wasn't about to tell him), so looking at the stuff again, just doesn't tell the story. In terms of the clutch, looking at a set of floaters means nothing and they look the same as anyone else's. Actually they look a lot worse than anybody else's.

"As I said, it doesn't make any difference, it looks like a normal clutch, albeit in really shitty condition. Most people will look at it and say, you cannot put that back in the car and run it, how can that car go fast? And yet, we can go out there, pass after pass after pass with that set-up in the car and it does exactly what we want. The clutch is sensitive, it will react to a change and it will react in both directions and you can make pass after pass without worrying about the clutch changing on you as it gets build up on it. It's significant simply because it's predictable."

So would this technology be applicable to other categories?

"There's no two ways about it, if people were willing to go down that path. But all the guys we speak to, and I speak to Murray a lot and he speaks to guys like Jim Oddy and Al Billes and others, and although Murray doesn't tell them what we're doing - he's very good like that, I can yak to Murray about all sorts of things and if it's something we don't want anyone to know about then he won't repeat it - the one thing I've gleaned from them is they all run their clutches the old fashioned way. Their idea is to lock the clutch up off the start line and just throw everything at it all the way down the race track, fight it through the tyre shake in low gear and if they can get through that they're into it and the car can get the rest of the way down the race track.

"There's a couple of things in that. One, these guys aren't making anything like the power we're making. They're probably making a maximum of maybe 2500 horsepower out of those engines, so they're way down the power curve when it comes to outright horsepower so they can afford to throw everything at it and the cars still manage to stay on the race track for the most part. That's because under Pro Mod rules they're stuck with 14-71 blowers, although the 14 Retro Helixes they run now are a far superior blower now than they ever were. And these Kobelco blowers, even at 29-over with their restrictions still produce a lot of boost - they'd be up over the 40 lb mark which is pretty close to what we run now anyway. But with that and the ultra low gear ratios they run, if they're on a good race track then the cars can run fast. If they're on an ordinary race track then they really do struggle to get the things down there.

"That was something we wanted to address because realistically we were spending a lot of time on race tracks that weren't particularly brilliant, so we couldn't throw all that power at the race track and expect to get down there. Right now we're probably making around 3100-3200 horsepower, and remember we can still add another 300 or so horses to that.

"We've been running the clutch for about two seasons now."

These are all pretty striking breakthroughs. What is Cleland's background?

"Engineering. I'm a fitter and turner by trade but I've had my own business for the last eight years, and before that I spent 12 years working for a company in Melbourne designing and manufacturing vacuuming equipment for laboratory use and industry. My prime job was designing and building the mechanical end of special purpose coating systems for electron microscopy and that sort of thing, freeze driers for industrial freeze drying. Anything to do with vacuum, high vacuum and ultra high vacuum. Stainless steel chambers, diffusion pumps, cryogenic pumps, all that sort of thing."

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