IT Rotary Engines

[Ron Earp]

Ron, with due respect, no they are not "paper tigers". They just need to be done through the proper channels.

Well, as one who just went through this process I have some data that suggests that they are indeed paper tigers of a sort.

IT is grassroots amateur racing. Not semi-pro, little league, or anything like that, but pure fun amateur sport. Along those lines there should be a way to check some basic specifications of a rotary engine without resorting to master templates locked in a vault and what not.

You and I go race. You go eight seconds a lap faster than you went last month and set a new track record. I decide to protest you, the tech guys set the bond, I pay it, and your car gets pulled down in the tech shed by Joe Average SCCA Technical crew.

If you have a piston engine the tech guys can determine a fair amount about your engine:

• With a dial indicator, a tool I have in my trailer, we can determine cam lift to a reasonable accuracy.
• With a caliper, another tool I have in my trailer we can very accurately measure displacement.
• With the same caliper we can very accurately measure valve sizes.
• And, in some regions a buret, dye, plate, and grease are available that would allow us to determine compression to a reasonable degree (probably to within a couple of tenths which isn't bad for trackside work and will catch gross levels of cheating).

But, if you are running a rotary engine one of two of things might happen:

1. If the engine is torn down in tech at the track what are the tech guys going to look at? This protest wasn't planned ahead, so no factory sealed parts from Mazda are on hand, and if they were they might not even be accepted by tech due to conflict of interest. There are no specs in the GCR, nothing to measure. Tech guys eyeball some ports, some expert says looks factory or doesn't look factory, and there you go.
2. The teardown bond is set high because the engine has to be sent off for inspection. Protest doesn't go occur because the protester(s) can't afford the bond.

The way things are a rotary engine can be a cheaters paradise. Fortunately cheating isn't rampant in IT but it'll be damn hard to identify illegal rotary engines unless you've planned way ahead and gotten the right people to the track at the right time.