What's in a turbo ?

[The Beer Baron]

What's so special about the turbo in generating the power that drives a Champcar ?

While the turbo gives CART the uniquness that avoids direct comparisons with other series, when the guys are battling wheel-to-wheel on road courses and ovals, no one could care less about the technology propelling the car!

If CARt ends up in 2003 with a N/A engine that produces 750 Hp or a Turbo that produces 750 HP , could someone please tell me the difference in whats required to drive the cars?

[Dr. Austin]

It's funny how everyone was cheering like drunken monkeys when Mike Mosely drove from the back of the field at Milwakee in '81 and won with gurney's stock block NA chevy, but now that's suddenly not good enough. Everyone loved the old chevy, but we are getting crys of "crapwagons" for NA Indycars that are far more advanced than those.

Personally, I think Indycar racing is about the individuals and not the cars. Sure, the cars have to be interesting and go like stink, but isn't 225mph fast enough? How many more Texas disasters do we need before we see the current cars are too fast, too expensive and too deadly?

Turbocharged cars are almost a thing of the past. Not many car manufacturers are using them on production cars because they have lost their relevance. You can get great hoursepower from a 3-lite V-8, so why do we need the complexity and cost of turbocharging? CART also proved it is impossible to control boost cheating with their Detriot spacer snafu. That little deal cost them Honda and maybe the rest.

Why do we need all this expensive technology if all that is going to do is require parachutes and pop off valves to keep the cars out of orbit? With an IRL car, you just turn down the rev limiter and not only are the speeds kept in check, but reliability goes up! Failing that, destroking the engines would not work badly, either.

NA road racing might just prove to be even better than the turbocars. While turbo lag has been greatly reduced, they still have a pretty good lag. An NA motor will have much better resoponse and low rev torque than a turbo motor. With the addition next year of an extra injector nozzle, the IRL motors will be much better suited to road racing than the current units. Remember that the Olds Aurora was the motor to beat in the road racing PSR series only a short time ago. I'm sure the current motors can easily be adapted to RR duty.

Besides, no one has even tried to take an IRL car on a road course, so who is to say they wouldn't be great? They have symetrical suspension, so all that would be required there is a simple set up change. Change the ratios and give it a whirl. The current wing package has plenty of downforce, but if it proves to be too much for RR, relax the minimum wing angle rule. Nothing to lose but a day's work.

If everyone is so hung up on technology, take a good look at F-1, because champcars generally run 15 years behing in that department.

So try to fill out the racing triangle. Three sides; fast, cheap and reliable. Pick just two and and make a triangle.
Since the safety freaks are going to make us accept slower speeds, doesn't cheap and reliable seem to be the best two choices?

[KC]

I will defend the turbos to some degree. When the rules were mandated to use a 2.65 liter turbo engine it was the most effective method that CART had to control the horsepower of the engines. By controlling the available boost the rulesmakers could control the speed of the cars. However, over time the engine builders found ways to make huge power with minimal boost levels. In the long run the rules have allowed the manufacturers to work on evolutionary designs instead of completely new designs year after year. But now the turbo engine has reached the end of its effective competition cycle at the current displacement. To lower the current power CART must either change the entire engine forumla or drastically decrease the displacement of the enignes and continue to allow turbos. This would only be a stop gap measure as the power would soon be back to the astronomical levels CART currently has.

The problem stems from the fact that the cars make far too much power for the oval tracks. Road street courses compliment high horsepower cars. There is no point in the CART cars going 250 mph at Fontana, it just geometrically increases the chances of another driver being killed.

I know a lot of people complain that the NA engines are low tech, but they are far from it. Sure they do not have the ultra-exotic valvetrains of F1, but a methanol fuel injected race engine is not low tech. The only problem I have with the NA engines is the sound they make, I just don't associate that sound with the CART cars.

I agree that CART needs to make a change because of the current economic climate the series is in. I think CART would be better served to use the IRL formula without the 12,000 rpm rev limter. Allow the manufacturers to supply 15,000 rpm units with the current restrictions on valvetrain and metallurgy they currently use. This would certainly better fit into Ford, Toyota and Honda's marketting campaigns for their road cars than the turbo units do now and it would allow a common engine block and head for use in either series.

[StuiE]

Turbo's rule on road cars it just isnt a car without 1 (or 2)