Ooops!!! What you don’t do is bring the revs up to 7500 RPM and when the light goes green

When things go wrong!

Here at Whitspeed we build fast road cars that work. Our cars grip the road and hurl you forward at an alarming rate. All the power of the engine is put down on the tarmac and NOT wasted in wheel spin, like most others. So when you take one of our sticky, grippy, powerful cars and put it onto a sticky, grippy drag strip, you need to take a few precautions. Especially if you have never done that sort of thing before.

The key to a good run is to build up the revs to about 4000 RPM, bring up the clutch pedal until you feel it start to bite and when the lights go green, release the clutch progressively whilst adding more throttle. Let the clutch slip rather than making the wheels spin and you will get a better time.

What you don’t do is bring the revs up to 7500 RPM and when the light goes green - DROP THE CLUTCH!!!

Because if you do that, SOMETHING WILL BREAK!!!

Let’s look at the evidence - as provided by the customer and from people who witnessed the event. I was not there unfortunately, but I have heard exactly the same story from several reliable sources, i.e. Racers.

The engine in this car developed 359 BHP on the day, the car was obviously in 1st gear, which in a T5 box gives a ratio of 2.89:1. Therefore the power unleashed at full throttle is 359 x 2.89 = 1037.51 BHP, and the tyres gripped. The result was that the car lifted one wheel and something underneath went bang! Obviously there were plenty of ‘experts’ around to ‘analyse’ the incident, but the pictures tell the real story.

All the power was forced to the o/s/r wheel because the entire car lifted up onto that side, which is normal due to the turning of the engine. The tyre done its job well and gripped the sticky tarmac and all that power went into one lower four bar link, which couldn’t cope with the shock. It bent as can be seen in the picture and all the load was immediately transferred into the other lower four bar link, and the shock of that tore the mount from the chassis. The weld did not break as it is clearly still intact in the picture.

This type of failure is a fairly common occurrence in drag racing, when the driver gets it wrong.

This is fairly easy to repair. Cars that are raced will break, that is why race teams have ‘Pit Crews’, and cars that are not raced will still break, that is why we have the AA.