Blaine Ramey of Ramey Motorsports is a Ford Engineer and long time friend of Performance Trends. Lately he’s been working with us on his 2010 Ford Cobra Jet Mustang. In just their 4th outing, they won their NHRA Super Stock SSBA class (which is a Bracket Racing class) at Mid Michigan, July 11 with Charley Downing driving. This is the FIRST win for the “Drag Race specific” Cobra Jet in this division.
Blaine has been using Performance Trends Drag Race Analyzer Pro “Team Engineer” version that utilizes our DataMite Mini USB Weather Station with Wind Wizard to predict his Dial Ins. For those not familiar with modern drag racing, Super Stock (and other classes) lets vehicles with very different performance compete against each other. What happens is the slower car gets a head start. How much head start is determined by both drivers predicting their ET, their “Dial In”. If the slower car has a dial in 2 seconds slower than the faster car, they get a 2 second head start. If a driver goes quicker than their dial in, they “break out” and loose.
Long story short, being able to exactly predict your vehicle’s performance, and cutting a perfect light is key to winning. With changing weather and wind conditions, changing track vehicle conditions, driver variations, engine performance variation, etc., your ET will change slightly.
For things you can control, you want to keep the car as consistent as possible. That’s why this class is almost exclusively automatics. There are also lots of electronic controls to keep the launch and shifts consistent. The drivers do lots of practice to hone their reaction times to be consistent on Practice Trees. And Charley Downing is an outstanding driver.
For things you can not control, like weather, you want to be able to predict how these will effect the ET. With a couple of rain showers over the July 10-11 weekend, weather conditions were changing quickly. And in this sport of thousandths of a second, you need to be able to predict these changes exactly. The Drag Race Analyzer Pro has some very precise weather prediction capabilities, especially in the area of aerodynamics and engine performance. Blaine used these to his full advantage.
The electronic shifter (again to obtain greater consistency) did not come together for this weekend. So Blaine used the Drag Race Analyzer Pro to determine which shift RPM would be best for consistency with a “human shifter”. He’d try a shift RPM, then try again with a certain amount of driver error in the shift RPM. The shift RPM which had the smallest change in ET for a given amount of error was best shift point.
He has also been using our Drag Racing DataMite Data Logger to monitor the vehicle’s launch. He quickly saw that their new suspension tweaks were not working and went back to his earlier, more predictable set up. The logger also let him monitor temperatures to cool down to the exact same conditions for each pass, again for greater consistency.
The car has been to the track four times now and Blaine was able to come home with a win in one of the most popular divisions. Blaine and his team beat some very stiff competition that had much more experience and funding. But his engineering of the situation, using Performance Trends tools, helped bring home the hardware.
To quote Blaine:
This was the 1st time out with your great tools and we won!
– Drag Race DataMite
– Drag Racing Analyzer Pro – Team Engineer
– Weather Station
The DataMite allowed me to quickly adjust the suspension to consistently launch the 1000 HP Cobra Jet on a very slippery track. Using the weather station and Drag Racing Analyzer I was able to predict vehicle performance to 0.005 seconds. This was crucial since we had to contend with constantly changing weather conditions.
Thanks for your support
Blaine Ramey
Congratulations to Ramey Motorsports!
