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The two weeks leading up to this event were hell for the entire team, with Nick and John bearing the brunt of the load. Chuck had the hair-brained idea of de-stroking a 2.0 liter engine down to 1.5 liters and essentially creating an “SR15VET 20V”. Nick and John took the pieces of Chuck's vision and turned it into reality. With the chassis pretty much ready to go, it was the engine that became the focus of our build this time around.
Stuff like SR15VET 20V engines are born when an engine builder (Nick Hunter), a fabricator (John Kuchta) and an engineer (Chuck Johnson) spend too much time together.You see, this chassis had already run 186.4 mph at Bonneville last year. But semantics caused the rules to be interpreted differently, and this landed Chuck in a different race class than what he was prepared for. The options were to either A) stay in the class he was bumped up to which would require a massive overhaul to remain competitive, or B) de-stroke the motor down to 1.5 liters. Neither option was to be taken lightly, but option B was definitely the lesser of the two evils. Since Chuck will be writing an article specifically on the build of the SR15VET motor, we'll skip the details of that build here.
This was also probably at around 3 or 4 a.m. Nick Hunter of 5523 Motorsports aka the Nissan Doctor contemplates what the hell he got himself into.The team saw several sunrises during the last few weekends prior to race day. Chuck, Sean and I worked on installing the engine and wrapping up loose ends while Nick focused on completing the installation of the new Full Race Motorsports/Borg Warner EFR turbo system. Once the majority of the turbo system was installed, John pulled a few long days to finish up the plumbing for the intercooler piping and Turbosmart external wastegates.
John Kuchta of Specialty Cars Fabrication pulling a 14-hour day here at our house. Are there any labor laws we're violating here? Or does it count when we pay in beer?
The team pulled a huge favor with Clark Steppler of Jim Wolf Technology, somehow convincing him to open up shop on a Saturday and do a last minute tune. Any guess on how much power and torque the little beast made? At the end of it all, everyone still made that final push on race day, voluntarily leaving their homes at 4:00 a.m. to make it to El Mirage in time to help unload and use every last minute we had to tie up the loose ends which still hadn't been completed.
On the lakebed at around 9:00 a.m., we were still installing the gauge cluster and piecing together the dash.
