Question about the Lencodrive?

tighter than you would think

The Trans Specialties converter is the meanest thing I've ever seen as far as torque converters. You never get the true 1:1. When I was driving/tuning the ATC car, you would put it in high gear, it would be slipping about 2.5%, then would gradually tighten up throughout the gear and be about 1.5% at around 5 seconds.

So you never get the true lockup, but that converter was so tight, it really didn't care what rpm you shifted it at, it was going to slip no more than about 3.5% through the shifts. Where that proved problematic was tireshake. A clutch car or a looser converter, you could shortshift out of the shake. This thing was so tight, you couldn't break the motor and converter away like you can with a clutch when you short shift. So here I was, really training myself to drive through the shake and not pedal, I'd ride it out until I was ready to punch the uncle button after about a second or so of no vision and getting the hell beat out of me, and like ok, where am I? Then you would hit 2nd, and it would shake harder. It was so mean it just kept on eating. If you look on my myspace page, (www.myspace.com/fcthrill) there's a shot of me in St. Louis, both tires have daylight under them and the 330' cone is right in front of me.

The next race we switched to Goodyears and the shake problems went away. Hoosier makes a hell of a tire, and has always been my tire of choice with a clutch car, but for whatever reason, with that converter, it would shake no matter what we did with the Hoosiers. We even tried the old 'it fell off the tire' theory 'so lets hop it up'...so it white smoked through low until it shook so hard it broke the six shooter ground off the car.

We went over the car with a fine tooth comb that offseason and found a few things, changed a few things and second race out we went 5.66/254. Next race was Houston and we went a 5.74/249. We learned so much in those two races, I really wish we would have had a chance to continue the program, but the owner opened a new business and needed to focus on that.

It looks like Wayne Morris and Bob Ginther will be the lone Lencodrive cars left until Gary & David Sumek's car comes out. From what I gather, Snyder will be running a clutch this year.

I still think there is a lot of potential left with that combination.