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Taking a Step back
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Austin Coil's latest setback providing consistent performance gains
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By Bill Walters Photos by Cheryl Boone |
| One of the most intriguing elements inherently involved with the enjoyment of drag racing is the barrage of new technology constantly being developed simply for the sake of increasing speeds and obtaining quicker elapsed times.
And when someone is crafty and brilliant enough to design an idea that makes his vehicle the fastest of the bunch, everyone else is forced to discover drag racing's ‘next big thing' just to keep up. It takes a smart man and a great team with plenty of experience, trusted friends, and a big bank account to develop a revolutionary idea that's powerful enough to influence, improve and even change the sport for everyone. One of those men is drag racing veteran Austin Coil, 14-time NHRA Funny Car World Crew Chief and tuning guru extraordinaire for the John Force Racing team. Over the last several decades the soft-spoken Chicago native has developed dozens of mechanical and technical designs for his race cars that have often become standard hardware for other teams. But it is one of Coil's latest and most ingenious ideas that has begun appearing on almost every car in the nitro pit area at the track this year. Every top team is desperately testing, in search of a way to close the competitive edge that Coil and the Team Castrol brain trust has built up through years with endless research and untold dollars in development. With this year's widespread use of the setback supercharger design, one of this season's biggest performance-enhancing developments is also easily recognizable, even to the most casual drag racing fans. I asked the primary developer and chief designer, Austin Coil, to explain the thought process and origin of the project, including the years of development that led up to the new design establishing itself as the ‘must have' component for those wanting to be consistently competitive in 2004.
In my opinion Coil's status as the greatest fuel tuner in the history of drag racing goes without argument. My interview with Coil occurred prior to qualifying at the NHRA event in Las Vegas and I found the upbeat tuner talkative and in a good mood. Coil was open and forthright concerning talk about the setback supercharger development technology and the future of the fuel classes. “Our first efforts had to be back around about '97 or '98 maybe,” recalled Coil. We just took a basically stock manifold and modified it so we could slide the blower back about six and a half inches, but that turned out to not be much value. The reason being, of course, is that on a stock manifold with a stock blower location the front cylinders run a lot hotter than the rest of the motor. So it's common, you know, to run much lower compression, as well as much more fuel volume in the front cylinders.
“So,” Coil continued, “we thought ‘let's move the blower back a ways and see what happens!' We've known guys that have tried moving the blower back two or three inches and that didn't really do much. So we've moved it back about six inches, based a lot more on theory than on testing. Truthfully, it still didn't really accomplish a whole lot. It looked encouraging for a while, but we finally abandoned that project about mid-season.” Then Coil explained how the setback blower theory made a surprisingly dramatic comeback. “As soon as we came into some time and money to expound on it all, we made fixtures on our blower dyno where we could actually tell where the air comes out of the bottom of the supercharger,” Coil said. “Our project was solely in-house and we did it all without any outside help from any other known manufacturers. Eventually we felt that we knew exactly where the air comes out of the blower, even though that hole is very long, there's a lot of re-circulating that goes on in there.”
“We ended up having our blower manufacturer, which is SSI, start making us blowers with a hole in them that just fit, (and) that had an outlet that was what we had decided is where the air comes out anyway. And then, logically, we placed the center of the hole over the center of the engine. Then we made more fixtures for the blower dyno, using essentially eight flow sensors and we moved things around to fine tune it all, doing the best we could.”
“We designed a special manifold with the help of Terry Kell, a friend of ours that has a shop in Las Vegas . He actually made the drawings of the manifold privately for us, and we had them manufactured and the castings made by a prototype casting outfit which makes most of the intake manifolds and cylinder heads and so forth for the Nextel Cup cars. They have the ability to produce a casting right from a computer file, so you can get your finished casting back in a week. So that was the reason we went with them. The manifolds are extremely expensive but they appeared to work really well so we started testing with them about three years ago.” Coil and the Force teams' setback blower project took approximately 18 months. ”From the time they said ‘let's try and build a manifold the right way' and from the time we started making all these fixtures and doing all these tests to where we finally decided we knew what we we're doing when we'd made a good manifold, it was about a year and a half,” Coil reminisced.
“At one time during the development we had an all-billet prototype and it was ungodly heavy, but it was the same as our finished project internally. We ran that on a motor on alcohol on the dyno just as a proof of concept and that was all very encouraging. Then we went ahead and made a casting and went to the races.” All of the design work on the project included the combined talents of Coil, Terry Kell, Bernie Federly and John Medlen.
The first car to run the setback supercharger in competition was Gary Densham's Jimmy Prock-tuned Funny Car during the last couple of races of the 2001 season. “Over the winter everything looked so good that we decided that we were all going to it,” said Coil. “We eventually decided to get enough blowers made and enough drive parts and all of that, and we switched all three team cars over to it. We made 20 to 30 test runs on each car during the winter and started out the 2002 season with nothing else but the setback manifold.”
“The performance gains didn't turn out to be as much as we'd hoped for,” said Coil, “but it was a little bit.” Very few modifications were made to other parts of the race car to accept the new style manifold. “It was no big deal,” explained Coil, “the firewall had to be moved back, but it turned out most of our cars were all ready for the new set-up. We modified a couple of them, but it was no big deal.” As far as engine modifications, the team order extended drive shafts for the upper pulley from RCD. Coil and Medlen primarily designed all the additional support systems for the front of the snout, which included a different idler bracket, some struts, turnbuckles and what have you and it all turned out quite well right from the start. By the time Coil had run the new setback supercharger a full year, Alan Johnson had a few manifolds he was playing with. “I don't know what his first manifolds look like inside,” said Coil, “but his current manifold looks very similar.”
“We basically ran the setback blower for a full year before any other teams began to experiment with the idea,” said Coil, “and then it took a year before it became part of their regular line up, as it did with us. “Our original manifolds were actually made under contract by Terry Kell at his Can Industries shop in Las Vegas ,” Coil explained. “You don't use them up, in fact, we still have them all. There were nine of them built and we still have all of them. We're currently playing with one built by Brad Anderson that's very similar and a little bigger in some areas and we've been running that lately, as well as our own.” “I think the single biggest advantage to the setback blower is that it provides more even cylinder balance and consequently it makes a little more horsepower. Plus it's a little more consistent. I think that racing a fuel car is so much of a constant day by day dance, coping with dozens of different problems and circumstances that no one, two or three different parts make enough difference to really care about.”
The reason we've won so much in the past is we're a pretty effective race car team in the scope of the hundreds of things that go on, from managing the crew to assessing the track conditions to being consistent. There are probably only three or four events a year where the track is anywhere good enough and the weather conditions are favorable enough to where there's any concern at all about making more horsepower. You still want to take advantage of those times when they exist, but they don't exist very often,” If it's hot and sunny or the track is new and not prepared right it's awfully tough to make it down the race track. In fact, at the last event in Gainesville we still had 15 degrees of timing lead out of it at the finish line. When you're racing under conditions like that you could have used an old standard set up from ten years ago. We might have had to hold only 10 degrees of lead out of it, but so what.” “Now I know they've repaved Chicago so I don't expect it to be very good this year,” Coil predicted. “And you know Houston is new asphalt as well, which they haven't ground. So you know I'm expecting pretty shitty conditions most everywhere.”
Coil concluded by saying, “Again, whether you win or lose is how well the drivers drive and how well the tuners tune and how polished the crew is in keeping everything put together and very, very rarely it's whether you make a little more power…but it sure is fun once in a while to go fast.”
Coming up with a concept that other teams eventually adapt to is undoubtedly a source of a certain amount of personal pride. “Well sure, it's a whole lot more gratifying than all of the projects and things we've done that we've thrown under the bench that nobody wants to try again,” Coil laughed. “It's kind of fun and there's been quite a few of those episodes over the course of my career, but that just means I've been here a long time. And since I've come to work with Force we've got enough financial backing to where we can afford to try to some ideas and naturally lots of them don't work.” But the setback blower is certainly one idea that has worked quite well and Coil is optimistically hopeful that there will be more new technological breakthroughs in the near future. |
