AMSOIL Sprint Car National Championship

Hi, I’m Justin Grant. I drive non-winged sprint cars, do a little bit of midget and silver crown racing as well. But today we’re going to blow around the TOPP Motorsports, NOS Energy Drink number 4 and show you guys a little bit of what makes sprint cars unique. [ MUSIC ] Some of the basic broad overview dimensions of this thing, it’s an 87 inch wheelbase, it’s got an aluminum head, aluminum block, 410 cubic inch motor.

It’s fuel injected with methanol. You’ve got a 28 gallon fuel cell on the back, behind the driver’s seat there. One of the things that makes sprint cars unique, it’s a solid rear axle, that’s why you see the rear tires are vastly different in size, we’ll vary depending on track conditions and track size. Anywhere from 12 inches stagger, which is the split between the two tires circumference, all the way down nearly to six inches sometimes.

Being on solid axle, that’s the only way it’s going to turn, it’s the solo cup effect, you roll a solo cup, and it’ll cut a circle. Same thing is happening here. Another part that’s tied into that, that’s unique is, sprint cars are direct drive. We’ve got a shifter in the cockpit.

You’re either in gear or out of gear. You roll up to what we call staging, lock the thing in gear, push truck, hits you and fires you off, and you’re done with that for the rest of the race. We’ve got a DMI rear-end, it’s got a quick change cover on the back of it. Pop those six bolts off, you can change your gear ratio there, and we’ll do that, tuned to track condition and track size as well.

You notice on our right side wheels, we’ve got these Vahlco wheel covers. The tracks as they wear in, they’ll get a real tall curb. It can be anywhere, it could be this tall some days. You go banging into that thing, which we do frequently, you find traction against it, you can make a lot of speed against it.

If you don’t have this cover, it’ll pack the wheel full of mud, then you got big vibration, big shake, tears parts up, shakes the drive out of the rear tires, and generally just beats you nearly to death. We run crazy low air pressure, so our operating range on the right rear tire is between 6-9 pounds most nights. Our left rear we’ll play between three and five, just trying to get as much grip and as much drive as we can, out of these slick dirt race tracks. This is my office here.

I’ve got an Ultra Shield seat with sharp advantage, safety insert, it’s a poured insert, molds to your body as well as a nice high density foam head surround, shoulder support. Going inside the car, we’ve got the torque tube contains the drive shaft. That runs right between your feet under you and into that direct drive rear end. You’ve got power steering pump and fuel pump off the back of the cam between your knees.

Inside these tubes here, we have a torsion bar, which is essentially a spring, but it’s in a bar that has torsional resistance. Moving into our shock dampeners here, you can see there’s a cable here running up the frame rail to the cockpit. We’ve got knobs in there that we can screw on while we’re racing, and change how much dampening each corner of the car has. Your traditional sprint cars got two brake calipers on it, two brake rotors, and one master cylinder.

The rear caliper and rotor is what we call an inboard. One caliper, one rotor controls both sides being that it’s a solid live rear axle. You move to the front of the car, it’s a bit unique, we only run a brake on the left front. We’re only oval racing and we’re always going left.

It helps us get the car turned into a corner, and initiate that big yaw that you guys see us blasting around with. These things get dirty, and we race night in and night out, 50, 60 times a year. You’re going to the car wash every night after the races, we’re there until 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning anyways. The less time you can spend tearing these things down the better, this is the part that makes that easy.

Quarter turn dzus fastener, you can pop the body off of this thing in no time all the way down to the frame. The bodies are also mostly carbon fiber. Just try and keep the weight down, and the carbon fiber adds a lot of longevity to the body as well. Radiator here in front, honeycomb to protect the fins and keep it from, a, getting a hole in it, b, getting just blasted and filled with mud.

On that same note, we’ve got a rock guards here to protect spark plugs and the nozzle lines down the right side. Moving a little deeper, we’ll run an outboard water heater that’s got quick disconnects here and here, goes back to this thing being direct drive, and using a push truck to start it. We got qualify, you’re in staging, motor not running, push truck, pushes you, fires off, and you’re wide open for two laps. Things got to be hot, it’s got to be warm, bearings got to be loosened up when that happens, you can’t go out with a cold motor, one, it doesn’t run good, two, it tears up parts.

These are pretty gnarly race cars. It’s important that we can trust the components and the products that we use. These motors are 900 horsepower, and we treat them terribly. We run them through the dirt, we turn way too many RPM all night long, and we trust AMSOIL to keep them alive.