Huge meeting at Bira this weekend
The Supercar meeting this weekend at the
Bira circuit (Highway 36 between the Regent’s School and
Highway 331) will probably be the biggest meeting of the
year. At the last Supercar meeting, the promoters had to
erect tents for extra pit spaces all the way down to the
tunnel at the back of the circuit, and parking space for
spectators was at a premium.
New Zealand invasion
This meeting has the added attraction of
thunder from down-under with six supercars coming from New
Zealand and a real mixed bunch they are too. Heading the
bill is Cameron Jones in a twin turbo Mazda, followed by
Wayne Conder in a 5.8 liter V8 Chevrolet Camaro, Malcolm Udy
in a 8 liter V10 Dodge Viper, Grant Brennan in a 5.2 liter
V8 Chevrolet Corvette, Andy Greenslade in a 6 liter V8
Jaguar XKR and Craig Corliss in a 5 liter V8 Ford Falcon
Super Car.
These cars are mainly from the GT1
category with full spaceframes and lightweight bodies with
mid-mounted engines, though the V8 Falcon would run in the
Super Car series down under, catering for Holden Commodores
and Ford Falcons. The New Zealanders have always produced
some amazingly powerful Sports Sedans and were well known
for coming across to Australia, blowing the Aussies away,
selling their cars and returning to NZ to build even more
powerful vehicles for the next season! My personal favorite
out of this group is the V10 Dodge Viper. Having had an
afternoon of fun at Lakeside Raceway in Queensland Australia
in a Viper, this race car should be a real stormer. How he
is going to get it round some of the tight corners at Bira,
I am not sure, but I would imagine he will be very sideways
at times. I am predicting that some of these cars will break
the minute at Bira, and will look sensational while doing
it.
The local SuperCars including the RS
Porsches conform to a different formula and will be at a
disadvantage; however, they will have the advantage of
knowing the layout of the Bira track, but I don’t think it
will be enough.
Of course there will be all the other
categories which run at the SuperCar meetings, such as the
Thailand Touring Car championships. It will be a monster of
a meeting, with Round 5 on Saturday 21 and Round 6 on Sunday
22. I suggest you get there early around 10 a.m. and grab
the first available parking space. My favorite spectator
point is the hairpin at the end of the straight. By the way,
there is the very inexpensive Bira caf้ in the pit area if
you are hungry. Remember to wear a hat and drink plenty of
water as it can get very hot.
A gentleman’s Jaguar
Spanner
set going cheap
I was fortunate to be given a couple of
books (thanks Alan), with one on tuning Fords and the other
on tuning BMC sports cars. Both books were published in
1971, so they were almost 40 years old.
How times have changed. And prices too. A
10 piece spanner set was 45 shillings complete with free
postage! A gadget to help you synchronize carburetors was
only 4 pound 15 shillings and you could get a head modifying
kit for 45 shillings, complete with a rotary file and three
grindstones of varying shapes.
All that work on the cylinder head and
you probably got a 5 percent increase in power, if you were
lucky. These days you go to some electronic turkey who with
a laptop computer puts a new chip in the ECU and you drive
out with an instant 50 percent increase and nobody even gets
their hands dirty. Forget about rotary files and
grindstones. No, ‘porting and polishing’ is not a dying art.
It is dead and long gone.
The horsepower figures that you could
expect to extract from your road going Ford or BMC vehicle
after high compression pistons, big valves, stronger valve
springs and a tricky camshaft were about 80 bhp per liter.
Racing engines in formula cars were getting 100 bhp per
liter and that was neck-snapping stuff. Look at the 2.4
liter V8 F1 engines of today with 700 bhp. That is almost
300 bhp per liter. Yes, there have been some great advances
in auto engineering in the past 40 years.
Unfortunately, so much of it is
electronic trickery which I quite frankly do not understand.
This is another reason I have decided to run in the “Retro”
class for pre 1978 vehicles at the Bira circuit, rather than
the more modern categories. And as another bonus, we will
have the only “Retro” car with a “Retro” driver, and the Mk1
Ford Escort runs a simple coil ignition, something I do
understand.
Mind you, it would be difficult to buy a 10 piece spanner
set for 45 shillings any more.
Autotrivia
Quiz
Last week I asked who produced the 675
bhp, 427 cu.in. engine and put it in what car? The clue was
1965. It was Ford Motor Company and they slotted the engine
into the 1965 ‘Cammer’ Ford Galaxie. That was a real ‘muscle
car’.
So to this week. Sebastian Vettel calls
his Red Bull race car “Luscious Liz”. What very popular car
from the late 70’s and early 80’s started off life being
called “Brenda”?
For the Automania FREE beer this week, be
the first correct answer to email [email protected]
Good luck!
Care for a
trip to Hanoi?
The Classic Tiger Rally is on again. Open
for all cars built before 1978 (which rules out the family
Daihatsu Mira), the rally is scheduled for February 17 to
March 17, 2011, so you have plenty of time to prepare for
it. The organizer is John Brigden who masterminded the first
Tiger Rally in 2008.
The start is Bangkok and the route covers
Kanchanaburi, Siem Reap, Saigon (Ho Chi Minh), Luang Prabang
and finishes in Hanoi.
You can get more details from Worldwide
Classic Car Rallies, 44 Dartford Road, Sevenoaks, Kent, TH
133 TO, telephone +44 1732 740 216.
Bio-Bug flushed with poo power
The UK’s first poo-powered VW Beetle,
called the Bio-Bug, has taken to the streets of Bristol in
what has been hailed as a breakthrough in the drive to
encourage sustainable power.
The Bio-Bug runs on methane gas generated
during the sewage treatment process. Waste flushed down the
toilets of just 70 homes in Bristol is enough to power the
Bio-Bug for a year, based on an annual mileage of 10,000
miles.
Bio-Bug
GENeco, a Wessex Water-owned company,
imported specialist equipment to treat gas generated at
Bristol sewage treatment works in Avonmouth to power the VW
Beetle in a way that doesn’t affect its performance.
Mohammed Saddiq, GENeco’s general
manager, said he was confident that methane from sewage
sludge could be used as an alternative energy source and was
an innovative way of powering company vehicles.
He said, “Our site at Avonmouth has been
producing biogas for many years which we use to generate
electricity to power the site and export to the National
Grid.
“With the surplus gas we had available we
wanted to put it to good use in a sustainable and efficient
way. We decided to power a vehicle on the gas offering a
sustainable alternative to using fossil fuels which we so
heavily rely on in the UK.
“If you were to drive the car you
wouldn’t know it was powered by biogas as it performs just
like any conventional car. It is probably the most
sustainable car around.”
But using biogas from sewage sludge is
yet to take off in the UK despite a significant amount being
produced everyday at sewage plants around the country.
To use biogas as vehicle fuel without
affecting vehicle performance or reliability the gas needs
to be treated - a process called “biogas upgrading”. Rather
than de-odorizing, it involves carbon dioxide being
separated from the biogas using specialist equipment. If all
the biogas produced at the Avonmouth plant (18 million cubic
meters) was converted to run cars it would avoid around
19,000 tonnes of CO2.
The Anaerobic Digestion and Biogas
Association (ADBA) said the launch of the Bio-Bug proved
that biomethane from sewage sludge could be used as an
alternative fuel for vehicles.
ADBA chairman Lord Rupert Redesdale said,
“This is a very exciting and forward-thinking project
demonstrating the myriad benefits of anaerobic digestion
(AD).”
GENeco said if the trial involving the
Bio-Bug proved successful it would look to convert some of
the company’s fleet of vehicles to run on biogas.
And before you ask, the Bio-Bug does not
have an unmistakable exhaust odor.
