Quote: i have a question that may shed some light on some things... spehar never likes to talk about old stuff,, i think he thinks its outdated,, but i dont know..
in talking to ted i believe he said that the missle was the first car to have titanium spring retainers on it and that before that they had to change the retainers every other run or something,, runing aluminum ones.
what innovations or technological advances did you see or partake in with the missle's early pro stock cars that is still around today, changed the course of racing, by making things faster or last longer, or is still used in average bracket cars to pro stock cars of current day.
jeff
I see Ted several times a year and have known him for nearly 40 years so the things we talk about and how we talk about old and new stuff may be a little different than your experience.
Anyway, getting back to your question on innovations the things I remember the most was the use of titanium not only in the valve spring retainers but throughout the car. We used titanium to replace steel for nuts, bolts, fabricated assemblies, brackets, you name it...
Another thing that sticks in my mind was that Ron Killen created our crank trigger ignition. Those early pieces were machined to his specificatons and we utilized this system on all the engines. We typically had a 10 degree start position and once the engine fired we would throw a switch to our "run" position for full advance.
Ron also set us up with data aquistion equipment for the Missile. I really do not think that anyone used this stuff back then. To say the least it was cumbersome. We had a couple of wire bundles that had to be at least an inch in diameter coming from the recorder that was in the trunk into the cockpit to another box which I think acted like a big splitter. From there the wires went out to the transducers located around the vehicle to pick up data we wanted to monitor. I think we could only record 6 items per run so this was a pretty crude setup. After each run, we removed the tape from the recorder in the trunk (reel to reel) and played it back in Killen's truck plotting it out on a strip chart recorder. Hoover, Coddington, Adam, and Killen would then sort out what we did with corrections for weather. Crude but very effective...
