Research and Development is probably the most important aspect of any companies survival plan. If your selected carburetor company doesn't have a dedicated branch for just R and D, you can stop wondering why your competitor's vehicle runs and drives better than yours from year to year.
A technology explosion is happening. So much has changed in fuels, cylinder head and intake manifold designs in the last five years that it’s likely that typical combinations that worked for you last year probably won’t function the same this year. Based on information supplied from various manufacturers, this explosion hasn’t even mushroomed yet.
The first literal explosion was a few years back in the fastest street car venue, heavily nitrous injected, torque converter equipped vehicles suddenly tightened up their torque converters to the 3400-3600 rpm range. They discovered this really gave their vehicles a strong top end charge but it really killed their low end torque and their ability to quickly get the vehicle up against the stage limiter. The lack of low rpm signal caused the next explosion you heard, the hood scoop flying 100 feet into the air.
Our company immediately addressed the problem and for quite some time our designs seemed to be the only designs out there that would come up against these converters and still go fast. Eventually the competition saw what we were doing and although it was obvious that some didn’t understand what they were seeing in our designs, they began copying it as best they could. Obviously they didn’t have the CNC programs or components to build the booster and metering systems exactly the way we were doing them, but they got “close enough” by their standards so they could at least sell product to the public.
Which brings us to another area of development our company recently completed. The new Mustang Nitrous 475SX-R. The new Mustang is quite the hit, but although the car was close, it needed more power before it got released in our opinion (what can we say, we love horsepower). In developing this project we learned, although the 300 HP 4.6 3v engine could be supercharged for mid 12 second quarter mile times (at quite an expense and hassle), the car honestly needed to be able to do the low 12’s or high 11’s to impress the non 20 inch rim and anti-wing crowd. So we took on a project that we now market through Ford dealerships that offers a complete package to get this car into those performance levels and into Supercar territory.
That was a fun project and now it’s in the capable hands of the Ford dealerships, we then directed our attention towards Chevrolet and took on Dale Earnhardt Jr’s program to help develop carburetion to meet specific needs they have for the upcoming 2006 NEXTEL season.
Fortunately some of their design needs also fall into areas of development that we wanted to explore. Since their road race design carburetors use Dominator style metering, our Dominator program could improve as a result of development of designs for use in that arena. Their unrestricted program is similar in design to our Championship winning and record holding Hot Street and bracket racing category carburetors that could also be further improved upon. So this new R and D effort is a match made in heaven.
Utilizing the addition of the fine folks and equipment at the DEI facility to our R and D effort really makes for some serious focus groups. If you ever want to visit a top notch facility with the utmost in multi level security and incredibly talented folks, stop over to DEI sometime. Its an impressive operation for sure.
We’ve got some surprises for the 2006 season and we took on a couple more professional race teams for Research and Development work in their race programs. So we’re expecting some big things for 2006, but 2005 was no slouch, our focus on some classes really showed our efforts paid off with plenty of championships and records. Now we’re expanding into other arenas for 2006. Wish us luck, in this competitive environment,
you need that too. Thanks for reading.