Dale Earnhardt Inc's Secret Weapon of Restrictor Plate Domination: The "Wind Tunnel Engine"

We're going to take it all apart. The air actually came out the tail pipes. You know, some people were like, "Ah, that's never going to work." So, we're here at the garage shop with Aaron Brown. He used to work at Daylor and Hart Incorporated. He's got this pretty unique piece of R&D. Well, just let him tell you about. This is our history right here. Seriously, what what is this thing? Early 2001, I guess, is when they had the RAD program. The RAD program then got disbanded. Now, what was that for people who don't know what that is? That was the Richard Andy Dale Speedway deal. So after Dale passed, then the RAD program gets disbanded. But Dale Nhard and Steve Dale Earnhard Incorporated, Steve Meal, they still wanted R&D program. The engineering program was coming along. So we kind of just started doing our own thing. And in doing that, Steve Mu became my boss, which was odd. So Steve, Steve, which was kind of cool, not odd, but you know, Steve was he was tough to work with. You know, you didn't get out of boys or any of that. I mean, you did your job and you better do it right or he'd let you know it, you know. So Steve came in in one day and it was John Clausmire, Gino and myself. I think HA Min was sitting there and and Steve came in and goes, "Hey, we need to test cows and air cleaners in the wind tunnel." Slugger had came up with this really nifty new cow that they started running and I think 01 or 02 I think that came around and we used to call it Slugger cow. So we needed a way to test it other than going to the racetrack and wasting a whole bunch of time in the track and really not getting super scientific data at the racetrack. So Steve said we need to build something that we can test cows and air cleaners in wind tunnel. And I kind of looked at John and John was an intern I believe at the time and Gino's sitting there and Gino's kind of just staring off at the wall like he usually did. I said, "Yeah, we can work on something like that." He goes, "Good, cuz I got you a wind tunnel date at GMA in 6 weeks to see if it works." Then he just left. He just walked out of the office, you know, he just walked out. And so John Clausmire and I and I think HJ Morgan got together and we started figuring out how how we're, you know, how do we divide up to divide and conquer this and Gino was really good with like the electronics, you know, with all this stuff and understood how to make sensors and everything. So at that point, what happened is I took on the the heavy the hard fab part of like we got to create something that goes in the car that will move air, you know, through the cow down the carburetor and out the tail pipes. And Steve never specified any of that, but I figured since we're doing it, we might as well make it all make it all happen. We all kind of came up with this concept. I think again it was Ha Morgan, myself, uh John Cosmmyer and Gino and you know Steve would come by and offer his his opinion on some stuff and you know that all worked out but we'll come back to this clear air cleaner lid lid later. It's pretty neat. Okay. So, Gino had came up with this system since we didn't have any sensors, you know, at the time or anything that we would get this small brass tubing and drill these tiny tiny little holes in that stuff and then he would hook these tubings to it and it was a it was a pressure differential type setup where you there's two brass tubes that we soldered together. So, the air going in this side versus the air coming in that side. And then John Cosmmyer and Ha Morgan wrote the program. I think it went in like a mat lab where it would change like colors and stuff that was way above my pay grade. But my job was to, you know, was to build all this stuff. And this is one of the test air cleaners that we actually ran. And it actually still has Slugger's name on it, which is the the Slugger insert. So, and then there was another part another part of it that came basically way down here and dropped up and came back up. And you know, kind of the funny thing is after we did all this stuff, we we we put two cars and went home and did all kind of crazy stuff once we got this thing working. And then they came out with the cow rule where everybody had to have same cow, you know, because people that don't work hard in racing get rewarded by having the same stuff as people run out front, I guess. I don't know. So, this is one of one of the test cows, but that's how all that works. So we had to build all of this. These are all these pressure differential sensors that Gino, you know, had speced out and and HA and John had wrote the program to translate the pressure differential into an actual, you know, like this is some kind of, you know, this is the data. And then before we get too far into this, I see there's a procharger inside here. Explain how the air get to that. The whole thing's going to come off. We're going to take it all apart. So, and then this actually this grid this grid work here actually went here. So, we can see the air flow across the actual cow opening itself. We can see the air flow doing work with the dividers. I mean, this has got a little deal, you know, still a little test panel in it where we slid this back and forth, you know, to try to tighten it up. Tighten it up back and forth. We did quite a bit on the shapes on here. Uh, in fact, that Roadster ran 234 mph at Bonavville last year with the DEI Speedway ring that we ran in ' 04 in the airbox. So, you know, uh, when they went out of business and started selling all that stuff, I knew I knew what all that was. So, I started I we used to go over there and buy as much of that stuff and I just stockpiled it. I still got piles of it in the back. So, but that's the way that's the way this kind of all went. Well, so we got this figured out and it's like, wow, that's really cool. Well, since the air is going through, we're like, okay, well, let's let's work on the carburetor, you know, if we can get by this time, you know, we're getting this and we're feeling pretty good about things because we had took that. We ran it on the chassis dyno car. I think Jay Gers did that for us if I remember right. And everything's looking really good. It's correlating. It's working good. So, we got real confident and that was we got this all done within like two weeks. that part like it was like 247 because six weeks Steve meant when he said six weeks he meant six weeks. So we get down to this part and we're still trying to figure out how to actually make this all spin. So we took this carburetor and we said well since we can work on that let's take a carburetor and we put these air straighteners in it. But this carburetor, if you come over here, it's we put the brass tubing inside the carburetor going both ways and made an X in the carburetor so we can see distribution of the air actually going through carburetor. So, so we got that all figured out. I think they think we took this over to the flow bench over in the engine shop. Gino took this and dialed this all in over in the at, you know, on the flow bench. Did you have to put these the honeycomb in there to make that more accurate? You wouldn't have that in there. That was determined by the engineers. I believe they did that so it would get a better we get a better shot at the sensors, you know, these sensors. I'm sure they got little all kind of cooler stuff. This 25 years ago, so we were just shooting from the hip with some of this stuff, you know. Um, but I'm sure Gino had a great reason for that. He was one of the when it came to building this stuff and making air turn into numbers and colors and pitchers. Gino was the best of the best and you know Jo Cosmeire as far as you know deciphering what it all meant is the best of the best. One of the greatest race engineers I've ever met and had the opportunity to work with. So So now we get down. We got our carburetor. We got our air cleaner. We got all that working. What's that? Um, so you just bypass there's a tube coming out the bottom of that that doesn't go through the runners. It just goes straight down that tube. It goes straight down that tube and it comes into this tube. And this is where the procharger This is the This is the guts of how we did it. The engineers figured we needed this was a 20 horse electric motor. Uh, and it ran on 440, I believe, something big. So, we had to rewire the shop to get to be able to run it. And so, we started looking around and, you know, I think Gino and John came up with this combination. So, it was my job to fit this. You know, we all decided it had to be a it's going to have to be a Paxton supercharger. It's going to have to be cuz that was the only way we were going to move that much air. And then the engineers, they figured out how, you know, what's it going to take to spin that? They did all that work and and and then the ratio the gear ratios of of this deal here. So, which we went through like a ton of belt iterations to get this to be consistent cuz the belt kept slipping and it was really it was that was the biggest struggle I think we had was getting the these two hooked together and actually running it without slipping because if the belt slip well then your air is different and then it's a waste of time. had to be super consistent for like 45 minutes cuz sometimes you would do a big matrix in the wind tunnel where you just turn the tunnel on and do this giant ride height matrix and was this thing running for an hour so it had to be really bulletproof. Um, so the air comes through the carburetor down into here in there and and I was like building it and I'm like, well, where's the air going to go? You know, I mean, well, since we're doing all this, I took it on the bottom and I hooked it, you know, the 3-in hose there, made some splitters, made these two boxes, and so the air the air actually came out the tail pipes in the wind tunnel. So now in four weeks we had this deal, you know, and people are starting to look at it. I think they were kind of laughing at it, you know, and Steve was kind of it's like, you know, nobody really understood it. I think Tom Ryan from the eight car understood it. Warren Bozel was really interested in it. You know, the guys that that built the cows and stuff there were were interested, but you know, some people were like, "Ah, that's never going to work." Well, in the meantime, we had did a Tallaladega test with our air cleaner stuff. So, we had those correlation numbers. We had the chassis dyno correlation numbers. Plus, at this point, we had this thing running. And we had, you know, just static correlation just sitting running, you know, idle numbers. So, John and Ha and them guys took all those numbers and made it into, okay, this is what we're going to do. And you know, Slugger, Slugger really liked it because he his cow was the best cow we ever had on this thing. And you know, we're the first time we took it to Win, you know, Steve Mills looking at it. He said, "Wow, this thing's pretty cool." We have this big control box. I I still have the box and you could crank it up. You would be surprised. It's really not that much air. This thing we almost had to slow it way down. It would you you'd think it's like a, you know, turbo. It's going to suck the carburetor through it. It's It's not that much air, you know. 800 CFM air is really not that much because with the restriction plate, what was that like 400 something horsepower? Yeah. 380s was I think was a good one back then. But this this deal we we worked through all that stuff in this amount of time and Steve walks up and I had this control box and I think it's out in the trailer. He said, "Crank that thing up." So I did. Well, I cranked it up. He put his hand over the carburetor, you know, boom, like that. put a big old dot in his he walked away with his hand bandaged up. But it you could make it really do some some damage, but we never you never we didn't have to run it that high. We were all really surprised at how low we had to run it to simulate 7,000 8,000 RPM at Daytona or 9,000 at Martinsville. You know, it really was kind of shocking how low that was without hearing the engine run. It's like watching Spinron spin 9500. It's like that's cool, but it doesn't make any noise, so you don't have that association. So, if you were, you built this originally to test cow stuff, but it also moves air through the tail pipes. When you were in the wind tunnel, did that give you better data on the the the effect of the air cloud ne next to the car? We we dove off into that. we were more focused on the wood area and stuff and that's why you know we started getting all this data which was really super cool but it was it was so much data it was hard to decipher in a timely manner to make it useful to get to go put a stamp of like this is what we need to do get it into production and get it to racetrack it just wasn't it was very difficult to get it all put together so much data and it's not like we had the computing power you know then that we you know that we have now. So what we did is we took our air cleaner just a basic stop you know air cleaner and we took and CNCed our own vacuum mold and we took it down to this place in Charlotte dropped it off and they made these clear clear air cleaner lids. So we put the clear air cleaner lid on it and then we took the hood and we cut a hole in the hood and put Lexan there so we had cameras facing down. And so what we did was is we had a coffee can, real high-tech coffee can with a lid on it and like a little tube with smoke and we would push smoke out into the cow area, you know, into the fill. So when the wind tunnel went down, it tear the smoke down the carburetor. You see how it's spinning around. I mean, to me that made more sense than all the zillion numbers, but it was really cool, you know, and the camera look down and you see, you know, the air is coming, you know, how it was folding down and, you know, twisting around. And we used the smoke wand a little bit in there, you know, because we found that uh, you know, the cow pressure really the speed it once you get above a certain speed, it was kind of did its own thing. It didn't matter if you're going 200 or 150, you know, especially with sluggers cow because it was so efficient. And in fact, we still run those cows today on some of the vintage cars that we built because they were that good. Back at the time this was being done, Dale Earnhart Incorporated had three cars. The 8, the 15, and the one. But really, the Penso car was the first car that kind of kickstarted all of DEI in 1998 when they went big time. And that whole particular segment of Darn Hart Incorporated history is kind of overshadowed by everything else that happened. Unfortunately, circumstances for better or worse. Man, Steve Park did a lot of cool stuff in that car. And that particular tie is really special to me because we work with Pens Oil. Now, I know you're watching this video because you're interested in all that history and stuff. Well, Pens Oil helped get Daylor and Hart Incorporated going and Pens Oil helps these videos come to you right now. And as race fans, I feel we have some sort of responsibility to support the things that support things we like. That's how that's how the full circle of sponsorship works and how this world we love to live in functions. We personally use Penso, Platinum, and Ultra Platinum in every gasoline powered vehicle that we have, and you should too because it's great stuff. Go look up some independent testing. It'll verify that just the same as me telling it to you. It's true. I use Ultra Platinum ZW40 in my Dodge R5P7 powered race car. Same stuff you can get on the shelf, goes into my real former NASCAR spec engine. Everybody has a car, drives a car, rides in a car. Every car needs motor oil. If you like these videos, you like history and you want to support that next time you need to change your oil, you go get that yellow bottle of Penzo from your part store and you can put it in your car feeling that you're doing something that's important and knowing that your engine is well protected at the same time. I really don't know what else you could ask for. And if you're already using Pens Oil, I want you to tell us about it in the comments so we know who knows the deal. Did you ever do tunnel tests with more than one car to see how the car in front of you would affect the way the air came into the cow? most miserable night of my life. We had this kid that worked at the shop. He helped on the pit crew. His name was Dog Boy. And so Andy gets Dog Boy because it was John Andred's car and we had the 15 car in front and we had Andreddy's uh one of the cars he was I think it was the Coca-Cola car or something, you know, the maroon one in the back. So, we were going to take Dog Boy to the wind tunnel and we had the front car 15 car tied down and ready car you'd sit it you'd sit in the car during the matrix and you let your foot off the brake and it was on a winch you winch cable and it would just let the car go back about 30 ft and then you stop the test. You bring it move it over a foot. You bring it up. We were trying to find where the sweet spot was behind the other behind the other car. Well, Dog Boy weighed I don't know like 110 pounds. about the same size as John and he couldn't make it to the wind tunnel and I found out the last minute I had to sit in that car for 12 hours. Obviously I'm a little bit larger than Mr. And Freddy and that was like terrible. I had to drive the car with a pair of vice grips on the because the steering I couldn't get steering wheel on. So it was a moving road situation. Well you had to sit in the car and you had to steer it backwards. Oh cuz the it was trying to turn itself. Yeah. You had to steer it backwards and then when you push it back forward you had to turn it and you know go up on we laid out all these lines on the floor. So you'd pull it up go over a foot pull it go back pull it up go over you know then we do the same thing from center and go the other way. I mean it was all night long. I think each I think each evolution, you know, as the car went back, I think I think it was like 30 minutes and then they started wanting to do like midc corner attitudes and all this other stuff and it turned into like a 12hour in this like car seat like it seat was like that big. How much of a difference did the position of the car make on the air going into the cow? A lot. I mean, I I think they took that data and and in my opinion, I think the engineers and, you know, all people who were above my pay grade, you know, by good ways, I think they decided how those cars ran best. And I think that's why Michael and Junior were so successful is they not only the aero stuff but you know Richie Gilmore and the engine program and you know I mean obviously the guys at the eight car they were always doing something cool and Slugger was too and you know the one car with Paul in them they always doing the best they can but you know I think that they did like really look at that at some point and go okay yeah we need to be here we need to be there this far back and you know cuz I know we did that test a couple times and we did some stuff up underneath the fuel cells and stuff to kind of get everything those to kind of really work together. You know, I remember doing some of, you know, some of that stuff in that two-car testing. Did you ever do two-car testing with different manufacturers bodies as the lead car? One year when Dodge came out with that goofy snorkel baby shark nose. The Arbark. The Arbark, that's what I call it. Yeah, the hard bark nose. Somehow Andy Johnson thought that that we needed to test that. Well, the noses were basically the same with the exception of that stood up part and so he appeared at the shop one day with a carbon fiber plug of just the orvar part and we took it to the…