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| A typical Winston Cup engine takes months to prepare. |
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By David Ifft, Morgan-McClure Motorsports
Of all the elements that go into your race car at Daytona, the motor is probably the most critical. But you can’t forget it’s a package that has to come together perfectly to do well here or anywhere else.
The motor has got a lot to do with it but you really have to have the complete package. You can have the best motor but if you don’t have the aerodynamics -- less drag -- in the car, you’ll be lost. Winston Cup teams go through hours and hours of work to get low drag in the transmissions, the brakes -- keeping the pads back from the rotors so there’s no drag. When you cut it clean you should be able to coast all the way around and a good driver can tell, when he cuts the engine clean, there’s something dragging just by how much it slows down. That’s how we judge how clean our car is, by how much it slows down just rolling back to the pits.
The engine is real critical to qualifying. You try to qualify with a motor in which you try to get 15 or 20 more horsepower out of than you would try to race. It ain’t gonna run many laps so it has all light components, oils, fluids -- you name it, we do it. We have special qualifying transmissions, with cut-down gears that are real light. The brakes are light. Anything we can take off any rotating weight is gonna help us. We went to Talladega and tested and then we brought the car home to get it ready to come here. We put in our qualifying motor and we had to add 20 pounds of weight to get it legal. That tells you how much lighter the stuff is in our qualifying motor.
For the race, you have to go 500 miles, so you put the heavier components back in. You need bigger brakes in the race because a lot of times the driver will ride the brakes a little bit in the draft. Instead of fading out of the gas and having to get it wound back up again he’ll keep the throttle down to keep the air going into the engine at the same pace and use the brake a little bit to whoa himself behind the guy in front of him.
You have to have a little sturdier transmission for getting in and out of the pits. You have to have better brakes and you gotta have a gear that’s gonna last. You gotta put the grease to it and the pump’s gotta be running for the rear end cooler, whereas in qualifying we don’t do any of that.
The engine room has been working since two days after Atlanta, since November, just to get here. When the car’s loaded to come down here they started working on Rockingham stuff. I mean they had worked some on Rockingham stuff, but Runt Pittman and the engine shop has been working all winter long on restrictor plate stuff. We brought nine motors for our single car. We kind of know which one we’re gonna go with, but we have time -- we’re here for 10 days. Everybody’s got to remember a dyno is just a tool. A motor that is six or eight horsepower down might run better on the race track than another motor. We might be three or four motors in between Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday to make a decision what we’ll use for the race.
Watch the interactive demo
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Getting the most out of a good motor
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