Editor’s Note: In a nod to our 91 years of history, each week SPEED SPORT will look back at the top stories from 15, 30 and 60 years ago as told in the pages of National Speed Sport News.
15 Years Ago — 2010
News: USAC has introduced RPM limits into its midget division. The Oct. 21 announcement was the end of a long road which began in August 2009.
“We spent a whole day and we talked everything from harder tires, smaller tires, gear rules, air restrictions, everything,” USAC President Kevin Miller told NSSN. “And there were some pretty smart people in the room. Rick Long, Honda engineers, Toyota engineers, General Motors engineers, Ford engineers, and they are all smart people, many of who have been responsible for the programs in NASCAR, IndyCar and such, and after a great debate, we all left the room with the same thing to chase and that was RPM limit.”
As a result, USAC hired Ilmor to commission a study; but it didn’t take long before the sanctioning body was dealing with negativity from within the midget racing community.
“With midget racing you have different platforms, and the anxiety of unfairness crept in real fast,” Miller explained. “So, we took a time out and we went to Ilmor Engineering and we had Ilmor study more than 200 chassis dyno power curves that were all different platforms, all using the same chassis dyno setup, using the same tire, same gear, the same chassis setup and everything.”
USAC and Ilmor also collected data during races held throughout the 2010 midget season.
“What they did was they looked at what they called a mid-match ratio of RPM, meaning that most engines aren’t going maximum RPMs all the time, but at certain tracks you have a larger RPM range than at other tracks.” Miller said. “At a big track like IRP, are running pretty good all the time, when you go to a short dirt track, it is all about acceleration.
“We looked at those types of mid·match ratios over the trackg and rooked at the different range of RPM on different platforms, giving them a baseline to where everyone was. We are trying to lower the baseline of the RPMs to save people money and do it fairly, which Is why we brought llmor in.”
Winners: Denny Hamlin came to Martinsville Speedway knowing he had to make a move on Jimmie Johnson.
As it turned out, he made the move on Kevin Harvick and ended up winning his third-straight race on the .526-mile paperclip in his home state in Sunday’s NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Turns Fast Relief 500, and in the process gained 35 points on fifth-place finisher Johnson and now trails by only six points.
Harvick gained 15 points with his third-place finish and is 62 points behind Johnson.It’s a three-man race.
Hamlin played a waiting game after winning the pole, and had to coax his No. 11 FedEx Toyota into a race-winning car. He sat and watched Harvick and Jeff Burton battle each other for the lead, waiting for his car to come to him.
“I waited and I waited and I waited,” Hamlin said. “I was hoping they would use up their stuff.”
30 Years Ago — 1995
News: What is NASCAR’s next move going to be regarding the perceived disparity in aerodynamic performance between the Chevrolet Monte Carlo and Ford’s Thunderbird?
Whatever it is, it likely won’t be what Ford teams consider enough to make the multi-million-dollar playing field any more level.
“We spent more than $500,000 on models and wind tunnels and development to do the things NASCAR wanted us to do, and now they’re not going to let us have it,” said Don Miller, co-owner of Penske South Racing, which fields the Fords Rusty Wallace drives.
No official word from NASCAR has come down concerning what changes, if any, will occur in the battle to make all cars equal under the law.
The changes, which were funded by Penske South, Robert Yates Racing and another Ford team, were verified using l/40th scale models in wind tunnels at three different locations. lt consists of, as confirmed through several sources, modifications to the “greenhouse.”
According to those sources, NASCAR will not allow any changes to the greenhouse, the structure which contains the roof and windows.
Winners: Time was running short and the oddsmakers were betting against Ricky Rudd’s chances to continue his streak of winning at least one race in the past 12 years of competition in Winston Cup.
Sunday, Rudd won the Dura-Lube 500k Winston Cup race at Phoenix Int’l Raceway, and the oddsmakers lost. Now they are only left with trying to put the numbers to the final battle between Dale Earnhardt and Jeff Gordon for the Winston Cup title. Gordon will be the odds-on favorite to win.
Rudd wasn’t able to show the strength of his Tidepowered Ford Thunderbird until long after the first half of the race was deep in the record books. Starting 29th, the deepest anyone has ever come from to win at Phoenix, Rudd didn’t enter the top 10 until lap 140, 16 shy of the halfway mark. It would take Rudd another 54 laps to work his way past Earnhardt and into the lead.
“I knew about halfway through the race that we had a car that maybe we could crack the top-five,” said Rudd. “I didn’t think we had a winning car at that time. I get the leader’s time called off every lap and I get my time called off. I was about a half-tenth slower, sometimes a full tenth slower than the leader. This was at the hallway point. Every stop that was made, the car was being adjusted, pressures, wedge adjustments. Then we started getting into the two-tire situation, and our car liked two tires a lot.”
60 Years Ago— 1965
News: Craig Breedlove, who flirted twice with disaster at the Bonneville Salt Flats, reclaimed the world land speed record Tuesday by roaring across the salt strip at a 555.127 mph average.
Breedlove’s bullet-shaped Spirit of America was clocked at 544.382 mph in his first run and upped the speed to an amazing 566.394 on his return trip to shatter the 536.71 mark set last year by Art Arfons.
Arfons, incidentally, was standing by waiting to make his first attempt to better Breedlove’s mark. It is doubtful, however, whether Arfons will make any runs until Monday when the Firestone Tire Co., sponsors of Arfons’ Green Monster, take over the salt flats.
Breedlove’s record run came after an incident Monday when the metal skin of the jet powered vehicle was damaged in a practice run when he hit 475 mph.
The 28-year-old Breedlove said his vehicle handled beautifully in yesterday’s runs.
The sponsoring Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. said the car is equipped with tape recording devices which indicate loads on tires, speed and other information vital to the driver.
Breedlove returned to Bonneville after a two-week absence. In his last appearance on the salt the racer’s front wheels became airborne during a run at an estimated 600 mph. The car veered from the track and lost both braking parachutes but stopped with the aid of wheel breaks. Breedlove was not injured.
He and crewmen repaired the damaged front wheels, strengthened the front end of the racer and checked out the car before returning to Bonneville.
Winners: There’s no doubt about it. The highly touted Chaparrals must be rated as the greatest all-around road racing cars this country has to offer today.
Texas millionaire Hap Sharp proved the point Sunday with an 11-second victory over Jim Clark’s Lotus 40 (carrying a 351 Ford engine) to win the eighth annual 200-mile Riverside Grand Prix in record breaking time.
Sharp covered the 77 laps over the 2.6-mile course in one hour, 56 minutes and 28 seconds, a 102.989 mph average, marking the first-time the event has been run in less than two hours.
Following Clark to the checkered was New Zealander Bruce McClaren in a car of his own design Powered by a 300 cubic-inch aluminum Oldsmobile engine. Charlie Hayes was fourth in a 364 Chevy while Consolation qualifier R.C. Macom copped fifth in a McLaren-Olds.
The crowd of 84,478 saw Sharp take the lead in the 39th lap as Bob Bondurant, who had been clocked at better than 163 mph in the long backstretch, skidded into the turn-six cement wall.
Sharp was never headed after that.
It was the 14th victory of the season for the Chaparral team of Sharp and Jim Hall.
