yep. there's a class for invited touring cars for anything modified beyond what was available pre72. and they've had a CA18DET sports 2000 race there before. preference is given to historic cars though, but there are always plenty of non-historic cars there. so yeah, come up and give it a go, it's the most fun, sociable race meeting I've been to all year. the track is awesome too

Mosler Automotive
2391 Old Dixie Highway
Riviera Beach, Florida 33404
Tel: (561)842-2492
Fax: (561)845-3237

Hours: 7-5 EST

US$119,000 or AUS$211,812
that's 10K cheaper than the HRT 427 might be if it ever makes it to production.

it's a low volume supercar. But that's beside the point anyway, it is not intended as a full time Nations Cup entrant, it was a one-off for the 24hr race to boost numbers and raise the international profile of the event. Gonna make it hard to attract competitors from overseas if they allow a local family 2dr sedan to crush all the worlds great supercars

the whole issue is Procar made a completely new set of rules just for the Monaro.

The Monaro situation makes a farse of the technical regulations Procar Nations Cup published, which claims to comply with Group 3E Series Production Cars, with limited aditional freedoms.

The Ferrari 360 Michelotto looks like a Ferrari 360. Modifications allowed to it are compression and cams which increase power from the road version's 400BHP to 425 BHP. Since the start of the year it has been burdened with 100kg of ballast, has had the revs cut back from 9000 to 8300 and has the inlet restrictor size reduced from 30.8mm to 29.8mm on each bank of that superb 3.6 V8 engine. Power is now below that of the road going version! Yet an Aussie family hack 2 door sedan is allowed to fit a 620 7litre le-mans endurance spec Chevrolet race engine!

The Lamborghini GTR is still a Lambo GTR, and also has inlet restrictors. Sure these cars have some mods, but really only to minor engine tuning, suspension geometry, springs and dampers.

meanwhile there is not a single thing on the Procar Monaro that relates to the production Monaro:
*Corvette Le Mans racer engine
*Holinger six-speed racing gearbox, with sequential shift!
*Ford nine-inch differential
*V8 Supercar front suspension and brakes
and specially fabricated independant rear suspension
*V8 supercar aero package
*even the basic bodyshell is heavily modified with tubbed rear wheel wells, completely fabricated fron inner wheelarches to clear the 2" wider than V8 Supercar wheels and tyres!

Try speccing any of those on your friendly Holden Dealer's options list! It has more power than a V8 supercar, bigger wheels, better suspension a more aerodymanic bodyshell!

The other cars that compete in Nations Cup are much more production based. Sure they are supercars, but that's what they are. Taking a Monaro bodyshell and building it into an unlimited Sport Sedan to allow it to kick butt all over the the greatest sporting marques in the world is a bloody joke.

But credit where it is due, Holden were very smart to debut the car at Bathurst to avoid any possibility of it being subject to any such parity measures as imposed on almost every other car in the feild.

If you want to see where the Monaro should have finished, look at the SS Commodore which plays by the rules that apply to every other Procar team, and finished 69 laps down in 10th place. 9 laps behind the Tickford Falcon, behind a couple of STi WRX's, and 43 laps behind an BMW M3. Not so impressive huh?

sorry for such a long post, but that Monaro really ####s me. but I guess you probably figured that for yourselves by now

This is an annual event and attracts about 140 cars. Dick and Steven Johnson have been guest drivers for the last few years, but only Steven could make it this year. He was invited to drive a Cortina GT in Pre 72 touring cars under 1600cc, and won the class, beating the owner of the vehicle who finished 2ndl! Guess he wouldn't mind too much...

Some of you Aussies might have seen parts of the hillclimb in Ch10's coverage of the QLD Australian Rally Championship round. They have always used the section, sometimes at night! This year they ran it twice. It is the only bitumen stage of the QLD ARC. They use a longer section of the road so the times are not comparable unfortunately!

I got the gearbox changed during the week - what a job that was! I won't go into details, but I had to basically pull the whole bloody car apart to get it out! If anyone is thinking of doing a conversion to a bigger engine, do yourself a favour and weld in an auto tunnel if it doesn't already have one. One day you'll be glad you spent that little bit extra!

It is a bloody scarry place, with big concrete barriers on the outside of the left handers to try and stop cars dissapearing over the edge. They don't always succeed! It rained on and off all Saturday, and it was very slippery, but great fun. On Sunday the weather cleared and we got 3 dry runs. Thankfully there were no serious accidents this year, but a few cars hit the concrete barriers, the worst hit ripping out the front left corner of a corvette.

I was the only 1200 there in Pre-72 Touring cars, but there was a L20 powered 120Y as well. I'm not sure how he went as he was in a different class - invited touring cars (that's any models after 1972 that were accepted due to their significance or just because they are interesting). I had a great dice with a friend of mine, Chris Berry in his Datsun 1600 with 137bhp at the wheels (good thing the 1200 is lighter!). We haven't raced for a couple of years back when the Datsun Club used to run events at Lakeside raceway, and we were always only a matter of tenths apart despite all the fiddling we used to do between meetings. And we were looking foward to seeing how we compared now, as we both have better engines, suspension, and tyres than we did back then. We picked up where we left off with our first run in the wet being 4 tenths apart. And it continued like that all weekend. As conditions improved we both got faster and the gap varied from 1 to 4 tenths with me faster on some runs and Chris on others. The inevitable mind games in the pits kept us entertained between runs as well. The track got faster as the day went on and the sun came out and some rubber got laid down. My best time was on my second last run, a 67.54 on sufering a bit of fuel surge near the finish. Chris did a 67.09 on that run to keep the class lead. I had to top up my fuel tank before the next run, and was pretty confident that I could get Chris without the fuel surge. But I tried a bit too hard on my last run, and overcooked it in the right hand hairpin that leads onto a fast series of third gear flat out corners. I turned in a bit too fast and had to get on the power to drive the car through the corner with a bit of oversteer. Good in theory, but I got it preety wrong and ended up out on the dirt on the exit in a big full opposite lock slide which lost heaps of time. It was dissapointing, because I got everything else pretty right and ended ud with a 68.03 on that run. But, to his credit, Chris managed to go half a second faster on his last run to beat me pretty comprehensively in the end. So I finished second in class to Chris with a Mk1 Mexico Escort 3rd. Got a nice trophy, and a bottle of Fuchs oil.

Datsuns were definitely the most prolific winners of the weekend, with 240Z's taking out both pre-77 sports cars over 2000cc, and Marque Sports. A Sports 2000 coming second in pre-77 sports cars 1601-2000cc. And a 1600 took out Historic Group Nc for logged booked race cars.

We got some in-car video footage in both the wet and my fastest run in the dry, which I will hopefully be able to post a link to later in the week I didn't get any stills though, but there was a professional photographer there who is suppossed to send out some proofs.

Their site is not updated yet, but you can see some old pics here: Historic Noosa Hillclimb

Just one event left for me this year, a club level hillclimb at Mt Cotton - hoping to finally break the 50 second barrier. Wish I had the time and money to do the Bathurst speed weekend - that sounds like a hoot! I'll have to make it there next year...

yep. a few, but it's still early days yet

here's a couple of examples of some generalisations and myths:

"With extra torque, you just go faster"

"A high revving engine cost big bucks. A high torque engine can be very inexpensive."

"horsepower sells cars, torque wins races" or alternately "you buy horsepower but you drive torque."

But it's all relative and so we need to be clear what we are talking about. We can't compare an F1 engine to a street A series engine. The objectives are just too different. They are tuning for absolute maximum effort peak bhp that will last for the duration of a race, wheras you are looking for something that makes your car a bit quicker without:
-being a pig to drive,
-running hot at lights,
-using stupid amounts of fuel,
-requiring the most exotic and expensive materials in the world, and
-being 'lifed' at about 2.5 hours!

starting to get the idea of exactly who has more limitations? and I haven't even mentioned the big one yet...

1200rallycar is right, I could (and have on occassions) taken my car to 8000rpm. There is no real power up there, but it will eventually get there if it has too - like when you get jammed in 3rd. Just out of interest, the A15 has a much longer stroke than my L18, and the same length rod as I use.

tertonga, any details on the piston and rod combo in that 9500rpm A15?

This is what I have learnt from various books and talking to engine builders. Any time you increase an engine's displacement you decrease it's responsiveness to cam timing. The biggest desensitiser is increasing stroke, because it reduces the rod to stroke ratio which determines some engine dynamics which are very significant in the 4 stroke cycle.

Increasing stroke (and decreasing rod to stroke ratio) will:
*increase rod angularity. This has a few impacts but I can only think of 2 at the moment; 1) decreases mechanical efficiency through increased friction; 2) reduces safe operating speeds due to increased stress to rod beams and piston skirts
*increase piston speeds across top and bottom centres. As these are where all the crucial valve events happen, the increased speed decreases the engines sensitivity to effective valve timing. This means the A15 will not respond as well as the A14 to the big maximum effort cams you need to get good power out of these little motors. This is a good thing for a street motor, as it is more forgiving to cam timing errors and where your cam gear limits the adjustability, but bad news for chasing peak bhp in a race engine.

The rule of thumb is that higher rod to stroke ratios are good if you are intending to run at sustained high rpm. Lower rod to stroke ratios work best at lower rpm and will tend to produce a broader operating range. best suited to road or rally applications. It's not always that simple, but a generally accepted guide.

ahh, the age old debate! filled with so many myths and over-simplified definitions and generalisations that all have one thing in common; they completely miss the point. It is really only simple high-school physics, but then I guess most people didn't really understand much of that either - especially the ones that ended up being interested in cars!

here are a couple of simple facts to get you started:
* torque is the (only) force an engine produces. It is the only useful thing an engine makes, everything else is a by-product.
* horsepower is not a force. It is not something you can directly measure from an engine or car. It is simply a measure of an engine's ability to do work with the amount of torque it generates. In real world terms, that rate of work is accelleration.

I won't try to explain it all, it's been done many times in a much better way than I can. Have a look at this article on torque and horsepower

there's not much accurate info on the internet and most stuff you read has to be taken with a big grain of salt, if not totally disregarded, but this article is an exception. Read it and think about what it is saying. Trust me, it is correct.

Without researching all the physics behind it, I reckon 5mm extra stroke will make a significant difference. I know it doesn't sound like much, but picture the thing turning 50 times every second (that's only 3000rpm) and you'll start to get an idea of the increased inertia caused by moving the crank journal and rod big end 5mm frurther away from the crank centreline. Piston speeds are increased dramatically travelling 10mm further for each stroke (ie 20mm further for each crankshaft cycle), and rod angularity is increased placing greater loads on it and the piston skirt. Although this may be offset by using a longer rod, I suspect the A15 rod is more than likely shorter to allow for the increased stroke and to improve torque. If my tenuous grasp of physics is correct, shorter rods will increase the max piston speed as well.

I forgot to mention that Jason Lea finished 2nd in Sport Sedans in his L20 powered 120Y.

Here's a run down of what's in my car...

L16 block, L18 crank and pistons 1770cc, ported SSS head 44mm In 35mm Exh, works cam, Datrally manifold, twin 45 Webers, custom headers. 120bhp at wheels - but that was nearly 2 years ago, and the engine is getting a little tired now. probably more like 110 at the moment.

Stanza SSS 5spd reverse pattern box, sports 2000 clutch

4.3 KE30 Borg Warner diff, CIG locker. drum brakes.
standard 1200 rear springs, reversed short leaf - dodgy but effective. Pedders gas shocks, urethane bushes. K-Mac 18mm sway bar - adjustable

Stanza struts and brakes, cut Gemini springs, wired in place - once again dodgy but effective. not to mention cheap. Monroe shocks. 120Y 20mm sway bar. approx 4 degrees camber - slotted strut tower and redrilled x-member. adjustable castor rods. strut brace.

Hankook Z2000 DOT type race tyres

that is pretty much everything, and probably more than you wanted to know.

Hi Allan, I'll let you know when I get hold of a set of 240Z lower arms. Still haggling with the wrecker over the price