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“The thing my mate drove started its trickery with a 12-volt battery poked into a six-volt casing – illegally of course,” Tuckey wrote. “He cut the tops of the front suspension towers to get the angles right and heated the banjo (diff) centre in a big press and bent the axle (housing) to get two degrees of neg. The tailshaft was ex-Customline, with the heavy-duty yokes machined to fit the Holden. He had an alloy flywheel and a big Dodge Six harmonic balancer to stop the habit of breaking cranks at $150 each. Some of this, of course, was legal and even the mainland guys bent the axles.
“But I don’t think they had spare wheels made out of fibreglass…he used plastic putty to make a mould, cast the wheel and painted it black. It would hold about 5psi of air to give the tyre substance. The boot, when they inspected the tyre, looked beaut. It was all upholstered in hand-stitched leather. The scrute's would say ‘lovely’ and shut the lid. What they didn’t see under the leather was the whole rear bulkhead cut out and replaced by one diagonal brace and the floor pan replaced with fibreglass. Only that brace held the two sides of the car apart.
“The back seat was just a spring steel frame with the trim stretched over it and would collapse if anyone ever sat in it. But nobody ever did because three of the doors had their handles welded shut, mainly because all the door and window mechanisms had been taken out and steel rod welded in to keep the glass up. There were even little fibreglass lock buttons (glued) in the holes – in the locked position. Only the driver’s door would open and had everything working. The floors had their centres replaced with fiberglass and painted silver underneath (to look like steel)."
“My mate started with Amal carburettors and then changed to Dell’Ortos which were also gravity fed. And here was the trickiest bit of all. On the firewall was a fuel box for the feed and behind that hidden under the dash was a little can full of (high octane) methanol. Under the left foot brace welded to the floor was a washer push-button and when the EHs were giving him trouble he’d pump it hard four or five times –and shazam, instant horsepower! The only trick was not to use it in the last three laps so it wouldn’t show up in the fuel check. ‘It gave you another 800 rpm and a real boot in the back’ he said.”
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You get 60 seconds of KERs to simulate the above fuel cheat and CSP physics for a live rear axle with two degrees of camber.
Sounds like a Norm Beechey special! Or maybe one of Kingsley Hibbards humpys.
ReplyDeleteSounds ridiculous. Obviously I need to try it
ReplyDelete