[njsteve]

Originally Posted by Rocky Rotella

Steve,

Did Rick ever mention running the Formula on his company's dyno? Was it possible that he removed the kick down lead to prevent the trans from downshifting while on the dyno? I know it's commonplace to do that when measuring performance on a chassis dyno.

Rocky,
I sent him an email with your exact question. For the life of me, I can't figure out why it never occurred to me to ask him the dyno question before: You owned your own chassis dyno, So what numbers did it pull? Duh!

[The Boss]

Originally Posted by njsteve

Rocky,
I sent him an email with your exact question. For the life of me, I can't figure out why it never occurred to me to ask him the dyno question before: You owned your own chassis dyno, So what numbers did it pull? Duh!

Anxiously awaiting his response!

[njsteve]

I spoke with Rick today and he is finalizing the novel-length biography of the car. He doesn't do computers so he is typing it up and will then notarize it and send it to me. What a guy!

He had no idea that the kick down switch was disconnected all these years. He never disconnected it and no one before me had ever pulled any of the lower ductwork out to access that area. So the only logical explanation given the lack of any installation marks on the brass terminals, is that it was never hooked up on the assembly line.

On the chassis dyno question, Rick said he did run it once but the car had so much power that it tried to climb off the dyno! Their chassis dynos back then had two rollers - a driven roller in front of the rear wheels and a free wheeling roller behind the rear wheels to hold the car in place. They ran a special tuning program on their dynos: the car would maintain a steady 2,500 RPM run and more resistance would be added to the dyno wheel as test went on. The driver then had to gradually add power to maintain the 2,500 RPM with the engine. The more powerful the car, the higher the propensity for it to climb the front roller. It was a very dangerous situation as the cars could then jump the wheel chocks and launch out of the building. Unfortunately, Rick didn't recall what the results were, probably because he was too worried about the car launching into orbit, off the dyno roller at the time.