Most expensive, least helpful and useless advice

Jim Caughlin · 10-22-2014, 12:34 PM

This is somewhat of a variation on your question but over the years I've learned a lot about what you can get away with by looking at various things on race cars that have been in my shop that I never thought would have worked, usually things that I thought were way too flimsy to survive. An example was an 8 second full bodied car that had 1310 ujoints, a 3" alum driveshafts and a 10 bolt Chevy rearend, all with a ton of runs and no significant breakage. I think what happens in a lot of cases is a bracket car that progressively gets faster and lightweight parts don't get upgraded. Nice to learn lessons from someone elses torture testing.

That being said, I have a boatload of 'good idea' parts in the corner that didn't pan out. As most class racers have exhausted the easy performance improvement ideas, it comes down to a certain amount of educated trial and error. Someone once told me that at this point, if you get $1 worth of performance for every $3 spent, you're doing pretty good.

Jim Caughlin
SS 6019

10-22-2014, 12:34 PM	#22
Jim Caughlin Senior Member Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Woodburn, Or Posts: 685 Likes: 83 Liked 805 Times in 245 Posts	Re: Most expensive, least helpful and useless advice This is somewhat of a variation on your question but over the years I've learned a lot about what you can get away with by looking at various things on race cars that have been in my shop that I never thought would have worked, usually things that I thought were way too flimsy to survive. An example was an 8 second full bodied car that had 1310 ujoints, a 3" alum driveshafts and a 10 bolt Chevy rearend, all with a ton of runs and no significant breakage. I think what happens in a lot of cases is a bracket car that progressively gets faster and lightweight parts don't get upgraded. Nice to learn lessons from someone elses torture testing. That being said, I have a boatload of 'good idea' parts in the corner that didn't pan out. As most class racers have exhausted the easy performance improvement ideas, it comes down to a certain amount of educated trial and error. Someone once told me that at this point, if you get $1 worth of performance for every $3 spent, you're doing pretty good. Jim Caughlin SS 6019