An interesting and informative round in the 1966 CanAm ground-pounders at Stardust.
No less than three Lola T70 Ford 427 CID V-8 entries for Greg, Pete and myself. I was clearly off the pace and there was good reason for that. One is down to style and secondly, I decided to run the car as an automatic transmission with only two speeds. This was as the car was entered for Mario Andretti in the actual race and I believe was a development of the Ford's Kar Kraft unit as intended for the GT40 Mk2 and Mk4 programmes. The monster engine has enormous torque which helps offset the lack of gears. As well, at the time of the real race, there may well have been no multi-gear transaxle available to take all that grunt.
I experimented on race day with assorted ratios to find a combination that worked to my satisfaction. Top gear was easy to dial in but first gear took some testing adjustments through quite a few test runs. There was a great limitation to this experiment in that the first-to-second gear change-up occurs at about a paltry 5700 rpm. I would have much preferred that figure to be closer to 6500 r's. It was necessary to find a bottom gear ratio that avoided the shift point happening at an inopportune time. Having to live with handicap meant that acceleration was significantly compromised. I note from the replay cap that both Greg and Pete are making manual changes at a much, much higher engine speed.
As for the race itself, pulling away from the grid was going to be tricky. With the auto-shift invoked, GPL gets a little weird in trying to figure out how to get the car moving away cleanly. It's very easy to run the revs clear off the dial. I did, at least, manage a getaway without too much drama. Dave started behind me and must have wondered what I was doing.
As the laps wound off, I fell back as expected but my drive was going well. Only a couple of very light nudges of the buried tyre polos. That was until Lap26 when I clipped one in T9 and the car spun. Really annoyed at this as the replay cap shows that there was a clearance there of at least 10cm. Grrr... If that wasn't bad enough, the incident was compounded as Pete was not far behind and couldn't avoid me. A massive collision sent both our Lolas into wild gyrations. Very sorry for that, Pete, but glad to see that you could resume to claim a well-earned podium behind Greg. Pretty decent to have those two cars take P2 and P3.
All in all, a fun and worthwhile experiment but as for trying to run the car as an automatic again in future, I think that I'll abide by the time-honoured phrase...
"What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas."
