Effects of Racing in Normal Car

[ekrampitzjr]

Ha ha. Notice I said most drivers in most cars. Not you.

At 70 mph my Taurus is loafing at just over 2500 rpm. Most cars I've had have been geared in much the same way, as my old Escort hit 3000 rpm at 72 mph in 5th gear (stick), and the Festiva before that was similar. To get to 4000 rpm in OD 4th gear (automatic) in the Taurus would give 110 mph, and I think the speed limiter would kick in before that—if Virginia's finest didn't first.

(Now, if that car could make the redline of 6500 rpm without a speed limiter...hmm...180 mph! Of course, it would probably actually top out at 125 mph or so.)

 

[Tosh]

Brakes will be your problem LONG before anything else.

But engine-wise, you can't escape the fact that component wear due to friction increases with the square of the speed. In other words, all else being equal, one would expect an engine running at 6000 rpm to have four times the wear of a similar engine running at 3000 rpm over the same duration.

 

[1999nick]

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Engines in light aircraft typically operate at much higher rpms constantly than those in a car loafing along at highway speeds in top gear. Sustained engine speeds of over 4000 rpm are typical in a light aircraft piston engine, but are highly unusual for most car drivers in most cars. Light aircraft engines must stay at or near their power peak to keep the plane in the air, which is the reason for such high rpms.

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It's interesting, in my 318ti averaging low 80mph I'm sitting at 4k rpms so that is a pretty typical place for me to be. When I drove up to nor.cal this past summer I was sitting at 5k rpms for a few hours straight (doing high 90's through the valley).

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As far as light aircraft engines are concerned, I have been unable to find any Continental or Lycoming light aircraft engine with an rpm rating above 2850. What kind of aircraft PISTON engine revs above 4000?

 

[454MAG]

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In the old days American engines were not able to sustain high RPM's without risking premature engine wear. The V-8's were capable of short acceleration bursts, but unless you had a special Corvette, Mopar, or Boss 302 type engine, the cars could not withstand 4000 rpm use for long.

I have personally witnessed many small block and big block chevy v8 run 5200 rpm all day long under full load occasionally banging the rev limiter when the prop came out of the water. If you ever rode in a performance boat you would see how stupid that statement was. I am talking about stock factory built GM mercruiser motors. The built ones you could rev higher due to more expensive valvetrains. Marine use is 10x as hard as automotive use on an engine. BTW there is nothing like the sound of a BBC wide open thru straight pipes. It must drive the tree huggers crazy.

 

[buster]

I'd like to hear 427's opinion on this. He knows quite a bit about engines.

From what I have read, many engines today are put through rigorous QC testing. Before I bought my Dodge Ram with the Hemi they talked about some of that. Toyota runs their engines at high rpms for hundreds of hours. The Mustang was put through a test where they did 400 full throttle starts from a dead stop or something like that. So I think manufacturing is so good, combined with QC testing it leads to believe that most engines can withstand more than most of us can dish out.

*Friend of mine said the Ecotec is doing really well in racing and they are pushing out ridiculous hp from these little engines. Modified of course, but the Ecotec is supposed to be one tough engine. Also, WOT helps keep the engine free of deposits.

 

[1sttruck]

What kind of racing ? Drag racing might be hardest on the engine and powertrain, while other types will tax brakes, suspension and such. I drove motorcycles for 20 years, sport bikes that I didn't drag race, and I got amazing trouble free mileage out of them for the speeds that they saw on a regular basis.

As I recall one year at a 24 hr endurance race in Europe the winner drove a stock Suzuki from Italy to northern Europe, ran the race, won, and drove back home, as the bikes were designed for that type of use and seemed to take it stride. Contrast with a 'duel' between a stock Yamaha and a Corvette that a sister publication of a cycle magazine said could finally beat a bike. It didn't, the bike was fine after the 'duel' at Laguna Seca, but the Vette went thru two sets of expensive tires, the brakes were shot as they were warped and had boiled over, as I recall the cooling system had boiled over too, and the engine was described as making lots of new, unhealthy noises.

 

[OriginHacker21]

1sttruck - "What kind of racing ?"

The occasional 0-40mph from the stoplight (this is the hardest and I don't do it very often if at all).

But I'm mostly talking about this: On my daily drive to work - both freeway entrances are very steep & uphill. So even the Corvettes/fast cars and SUVs have to floor it to hop on the freeway fast enough. Wondering how much it would hurt me to WOT or close to WOT up those inclines everyday (0-70mph). It would make the truckers a lot happier I think.


Interesting post 1sttruck ... - I assumed that racing motorcycles could take that sort of abuse a lot better than any vehicle on the road today. A lot of my college friends have purchased these expensive and super fast bikes. I know a few that aren't here anymore (died) and several who have crashed badly and can't work for a long time. So, as much as I would like a fast bike - might wait till I get older so I can control the urge to push it.

Thanks for the posts all - very interesting. I've been watching NASCAR/the like and the 24 hour Le-mans races are the most awesome. Wonder how long a stock car would last doing those and the effect on the engine/oil of doing that.

 

[OriginHacker21]

buster - "*Friend of mine said the Ecotec is doing really well in racing and they are pushing out ridiculous hp from these little engines. Modified of course, but the Ecotec is supposed to be one tough engine. Also, WOT helps keep the engine free of deposits. "

Yeah, I've seen the GM article that talked about how they pushed the Ecotec engine to 1000 horsepower. The stock Ecotec could take a boost from 140hp up to 240hp without any changes in tranny or engine. GM has a 1000hp Ecotec (sunfire) that they race.

Some random article off of Google Search:
1000hpSunfire

Quote from above website: "In stock form the Ecotec is rated at 140 horsepower. The basic engine is so well engineered that the GM Racing engineers and Shavers Racing Engines were able to reliably extract over 1000 horsepower from the engine with a single turbo running on alcohol. And this was done using the production cylinder head and block castings!"

I tried looking for the article I read awhile back but I can't find it (had GM mechanics talking how they boosted it little by little and what happened to the car as they increased the HP from 140hp to 1000hp slowly). They had to tilt the engine a certain way because the oil wouldn't go to the top end during the drag runs. It was an interesting read.

 

[windnsea00]

^Speaking of robust 4-cylinders, back in the 80's BMW used a 1.5 liter turbo 4 cylinder in racing that was capable of 1,200 horsepower!

 

[dailydriver]

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buster - "*Friend of mine said the Ecotec is doing really well in racing and they are pushing out ridiculous hp from these little engines. Modified of course, but the Ecotec is supposed to be one tough engine. Also, WOT helps keep the engine free of deposits. "

Yeah, I've seen the GM article that talked about how they pushed the Ecotec engine to 1000 horsepower. The stock Ecotec could take a boost from 140hp up to 240hp without any changes in tranny or engine. GM has a 1000hp Ecotec (sunfire) that they race.

Some random article off of Google Search:
1000hpSunfire

Quote from above website: "In stock form the Ecotec is rated at 140 horsepower. The basic engine is so well engineered that the GM Racing engineers and Shavers Racing Engines were able to reliably extract over 1000 horsepower from the engine with a single turbo running on alcohol. And this was done using the production cylinder head and block castings!"

I tried looking for the article I read awhile back but I can't find it (had GM mechanics talking how they boosted it little by little and what happened to the car as they increased the HP from 140hp to 1000hp slowly). They had to tilt the engine a certain way because the oil wouldn't go to the top end during the drag runs. It was an interesting read.

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Yes, it's cool that they are beating the import racers (who have been at it MUCH longer) at their OWN game!

 

[Mitch Alsup]

My Ferrari has over 5,000 race miles on the engine and 50,000 total street miles. At the race tracks it has over 20 minutes ABOVE red line (not recommended), and occasionally gets to run a whole tank of gasoline in a single stint (72 minutes).

Other than changing the oil after a track weekend, and doing normal maintanence (normal for a Ferrari). This car runs like a top and has normal leak downs for an engine of its age.

The interesting think (which is why I write this) is that through experimentation, I have determined that this car likes 5W-40 oils better than xxW-50 oils, and that if it were not having ths snot run out of it on the race track, that I would be using a xW-30 oil for street purposes. The heat exchange capabilities of this (bone stock) package are simply extrarodinary (hours of laps in 103dF Texas summer heat with narry an issue.

 

[AEHaas]

“my BMW hits 5K rpm range multiple times on my 12 min drive back home from work, and on the way to work as well. engine is in superb condition for 152000 miles, and the transmission still works, but the wheel bearings were toast, and the power steering box leaks quite a bit.”

As with engine oil other automotive parts benefit from warming up to operating temperature. Most wear occurs during the time before the normal operating temperature for that part is reached, for engine oil it takes 20 - 30 minutes.

“one would expect an engine running at 6000 rpm to have four times the wear of a similar engine running at 3000 rpm over the same duration. “

Wear varies with RPM directly but is mostly load dependent. Higher RPM at low load produces far less wear than higher RPM at full load. High load at low RPM has much more wear than low load at low RPM. Airplane piston engines run at lower RPM but near full load most of the time so replacement is needed after time measured in the hundreds of hours.

aehaas

 

[PT1]

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It is very harmful if you care about your wallets, gasoline prices or our dependency on foreign oil.

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[OriginHacker21]

My dad's Mooney airplane has a 4cyl engine and I know whenever we fly to work in it - it's running WOT all the time - on takeoffs and climb. The MAX RPMS are 2,700 - interesting for a 4cyl engine. But yes - engine has to be replaced every 2,000 hours for this particular engine. Engine = "horizontally opposed cylinders, fuel injected" Lycoming IO360

I never thought of bringing my dad's airplane engine into this... but interesting indeed...

So engine load is a huge determiner of wear on an engine in racing. Now trying to think if WOT = 100% load once reaching top speed.

 

[ekrampitzjr]

About the old big-block V-8s, I was referring to those engines as they first came out in the late 1960s-early 1970s. Redlines increased in later years. I recall magazines from the '70s talking about marine conversions for the Ford 460 as it was built then, and the redline was only 4000 rpm in that application.

About the aviation engines, I might be conflating the revs typically attained by converted auto engines. I know that reduction gearboxes for props are geared to a certain engine speed to avoid overspeeding the prop. My bad if I'm mistaken on the rpms on true aviation engines. The point was mainly that aviation engines run at close to their peak power all the time, while this is highly unusual for most passenger car engines on the road.

 

[cssprophet]

The redline is there for a reason. Engines are designed to operate safely from idle to the redline. If your factory redline is set at 6,500 it was only safe to run it to 5k, the factory redline would be 5k. As long as you're not throttling a cold engine, you should be fine. Obviously there will be increased wear and tear, but it's not like your car will last 150k miles instead of 200k miles.

If you have an older car and the engine fails in some manner operating under the redline, then you already had a problem and should be thankful you caught it sooner rather than later. I don't think I've hit the redline in my car (102k miles on it), but I regularly take it 5-6k (redlines at 6.5k). I believe an engine should be able to operate safely throughout its designated ranges no matter how many miles are on it. If it can't, there's something wrong that needs to be fixed.

 

[dailydriver]

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My Ferrari has over 5,000 race miles on the engine and 50,000 total street miles. At the race tracks it has over 20 minutes ABOVE red line (not recommended), and occasionally gets to run a whole tank of gasoline in a single stint (72 minutes).

Other than changing the oil after a track weekend, and doing normal maintanence (normal for a Ferrari). This car runs like a top and has normal leak downs for an engine of its age.

The interesting think (which is why I write this) is that through experimentation, I have determined that this car likes 5W-40 oils better than xxW-50 oils, and that if it were not having ths snot run out of it on the race track, that I would be using a xW-30 oil for street purposes. The heat exchange capabilities of this (bone stock) package are simply extrarodinary (hours of laps in 103dF Texas summer heat with narry an issue.

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Vintage 250 GTO?? Just taking a WILD guess. What is it actually?

 

[XB70]

For those interested, the GMTunersource Race Shop has several pdf files detailing what they're doing with both engines and chassis in drag racing, drifting and road racing

, though the Grand Am Cobalt (Koni Challenge Series - ST Class) pdf is mistakenly listed in the Sport Compact Drag Racing category.

 

[454MAG]

Quote "About the old big-block V-8s, I was referring to those engines as they first came out in the late 1960s-early 1970s. Redlines increased in later years. I recall magazines from the '70s talking about marine conversions for the Ford 460 as it was built then, and the redline was only 4000 rpm in that application."

I bought a Chris craft years ago that had twin 1967 holman moody 427 ford side oilers rated at 500 hp. I do not know what the redline was but the guy I sold them to ran 9 sec 1/4 miles in a 3200 lb car with 1 of them. I can gaurantee he was spinning that 25 year old longblock way over 4k.

On the other hand ford motors never held up well to marine use in general. Bottom end bearing failures were common. GM and Chryslers have proven very reliable. I remember seeing an ad for a Toyota boat motor years ago but have never seen one.

 

[Mitch Alsup]

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My Ferrari has over 5,000 race miles on the engine and 50,000 total street miles. At the race tracks it has over 20 minutes ABOVE red line (not recommended), and occasionally gets to run a whole tank of gasoline in a single stint (72 minutes).

Other than changing the oil after a track weekend, and doing normal maintanence (normal for a Ferrari). This car runs like a top and has normal leak downs for an engine of its age.

The interesting think (which is why I write this) is that through experimentation, I have determined that this car likes 5W-40 oils better than xxW-50 oils, and that if it were not having ths snot run out of it on the race track, that I would be using a xW-30 oil for street purposes. The heat exchange capabilities of this (bone stock) package are simply extrarodinary (hours of laps in 103dF Texas summer heat with narry an issue.

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Vintage 250 GTO?? Just taking a WILD guess. What is it actually?

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It is a 1995 F355B.