Accounting 101

(If you would like us to consider your street rod for evaluation please mail or e-mail us a photo and description of your car: STREET RODDER, Attn: Track Day, 720 Hundley Way, Placentia, CA 92870; e-mail, brian.brennan@sorc.com, subject line, Track Day. Sorry, but photos cannot be returned.)

Street rods are to performance as high heels are to fashion. Within the go-fast world street rods are analogous to women's high heels--visually spectacular but not very practical. Rodding's roots are deeply buried in performance on the street, at the track, or out at the dry lakes. Yet, it's equally as true that when hot rods became street rods a bit of the "edge" was lost. To use today's vernacular, its "street cred" vanished.

Has rodding come full circle? For 30-plus years STREET RODDER has uncovered one spectacular car after another. It can never be said that creativity and craftsmanship are lacking within the rodding world. However, it has been said, "You can't drive 'em," or "They look good but they don't run." Despite the sayings, though, it has been proven beyond any rational thinking man's doubt that today's street rods can be driven (often and reliably) over the long haul. Yet the stigma persists--is true performance alive or has it been lost? What is performance and how does one measure it? STREET RODDER defines performance as a compilation of the following components: acceleration, braking, side-to-side handling (slalom course), grip (skidpad), and plain ol' grunt--horsepower and torque. We are looking for street rods that can supply us with data to fill-in the "performance gaps" so that all rodders will benefit from the various powertrain (engine/transmission/rearend) and chassis (front/rear suspension and brake) combinations at work. It's time to put to rest the performance myths and generate some facts that rods are the "big dogs" of street performance. Or are they? Let's find out.

Last month (Jan. '04) we evaluated Bill Mitchell's "rad"-looking and wildly performing fenderless '33 Ford coupe. Visually, the car has all the credentials that'd make it a topflight street rod, but that's not the entire story. We took the 454-inch small-block (wow, is that an oxymoron?) Chevy V-8 to Englishtown Raceway Park and put it though its paces. The 1/4-mile e.t. (11.98 sec.) and trap speed (116.06 mph) achieved on street tires and through the mufflers were astounding and would have made any performance buff all giggly.

Elsewhere in this issue you will see and read what some are touting to date as the "ultimate performing street rod." It's the '34 Ford roadster belonging to Brock Yates. This one-of-a-kind street rod draws its powertrain from a Dodge Viper extolling the virtues of 465-hp through a six-speed gearbox. It can travel a straight line quicker than most, corner alongside the best, and emerge blindingly fast from sixth gear, yet it's well suited for a cross-country trip--say the Cannonball Rally--or for a drive to Louisville the first week in August, sans top, of course!

In the months to come we will track test past winners of the Ridler and America's Most Beautiful Roadster awards to see if they can perform as well as they look...? Was the checkbook really used in all the right places? SRM will also select former cover cars, feature rods, and other machinery and put them through the paces to see if they are something more than a power parker's delight. One thing is for sure, there will be surprises. Hopefully, in the end, this will put to rest the naysayers that look upon street rods as nothing more than automotive titillation--something for the eyes but not much for the seat of the pants. The days of a street rod "sitting" on the porch are over; it's time to run with the big dogs--if they can?

How are we going to do this? Well, scientific data is a great place to start. The staff at SRM didn't invent automotive testing but we have looked at what experts in the field are currently doing and have tailored it to our needs. To get started we selected two cars from the SRM garage. We'll be testing the McMullen-clone roadster and the M-2000, both are fiberglass Deuce highboy roadsters and each is powered by a small-block Chevy. However, the clone is a solid axle rod at both ends, while the M-2000 is fully independent. This will make the test interesting--how does a solid axle versus independent street rod compare? Each car has approximately 30,000 miles on the odometer and each has gone through its share of weather, bad roads, and other misfortunes, proving driveability and reliability.

All of the related track testing is to be done in a controlled and safe environment. On the East Coast we'll use Englishtown Raceway, while in SoCal we'll be at California Speedway. There are other facilities throughout the country, but you get the picture. We enlisted staffers from "sister" publications that are test track experienced to serve as drivers and technicians. With their experience and impartiality we'll gather accurate and useable data. While the data will surely be entertaining, more importantly it will help current and future rodders to "see" what performance levels they can expect when mixing various components.

What are the criteria that we will use to design our performance parameters around? In other words, what the heck are we going to report on that you, the reader and street rod owner and driver, can relate and compare your wheels to? It's our intent to gather acceleration data from the 1/4-mile (sometimes the 1/8-mile), which will include 60-foot times from 0-30, 0-60, 0-100 mph, and from 50-80 mph (we call it our freeway-passing test). For all of that "go" there must be a corresponding "whoa" and that would be the deceleration (braking) data from 60-0 mph.

This data will be gathered while running on a dragstrip using a Stalker ATS radar system. The data is to be acquired during each pass and will be concurrently saved on a conventional PC laptop previously downloaded with Stalker ATS software. The information will be subsequently edited on-site. With the intent of gathering accurate and repeatable data, we'll correct every acceleration pass to a "standard day," which is 60 degrees Fahrenheit with 0 percent humidity and 29.92 inches of mercury.

Achieving this end result will come by way of more technology; we'll employ the algorithms of Computech Systems, who manufacture the RaceAir Pro weather analyzer. The RaceAir is an all-inclusive weather machine that calculates a correction factor based on temperature, relative humidity, and barometric pressure. All one needs to do is press the sample data button and enter a given elapsed time and mile per hour and the RaceAir will output the standard day correction.

Just as radar is used for straight-line acceleration/deceleration, timing systems are used for lateral acceleration and slalom testing. STREET RODDER defines speed as a relationship between time and distance; all 'g' and slalom measurements are acquired with a wireless Brower Timing System. The 420-foot (cone every 70 feet) slalom uses one invisible beam at each end of the course. When the street rod triggers the first beam, a wireless signal is sent to a handheld receiver. When it passes through the second beam, the timer stops. Once the number of seconds it takes to pass through the slalom course is acquired, it's divided by the length of the course, thus giving us a feet-per-second measurement. We can then translate the number of fps to an actual mph.

Using the same Brower technology, we'll measure off a 100-foot radius to create our 200-foot diameter skidpad. The time it takes for a vehicle to travel around the circumference of a 200-foot skidpad has a direct relationship to its road holding capability. For example, if a lightweight highboy roadster weighing 2,000 pounds can pull 1g on a 200-foot skidpad, its lateral road holding capability is equal to its weight of 2,000 pounds. This means that a street rod that pulls 1g, can actually hold its own weight while in a turn, solely on grip.

And that brings us to grunt--horsepower and torque. We will not always have access to a chassis dyno but between the SRM Tech Center (with its own Dynojet chassis dynamometer) and other areas around the country we should be able to gather plenty of rear wheel horsepower and torque readings. The dyno is another measure of performance and potentially the one test that can yield the greatest blow to a street rodder's ego. Incredibly, all of the equipment can be placed in a medium-sized suitcase and transported anywhere our investigative minds wish to take us. (Ah, all but the Dynojet chassis dyno!)

So, without so much as dusting off the paint, both cars were driven the 100-mile round-trip to California Speedway in Fontana, California (where it's always 90 degrees, sunny, and humid!) and the testing began. Here we go...