| I've
seen it all, something new comes along.
We were dyno testing our race motor before the AutoZone
Winternationals when it suddenly made one of those very
expensive noises that usually means big trouble.
"Dropped a valve!" someone declared.
"Broke a pin!" said another. Everyone had a
theory as we removed the heads and found an unfamiliar
piece of metal in a cylinder. Then the conclusions
flowed like a Texas flash flood: "You left the
covers off the carburetors - that's a bottle cap that
went down the manifold." We had at least 20
different explanations for the failure.
Finally we discovered the truth: A balance weight had
come off one of the blades of the dyno room fan. That
weight had stayed in place for 15 years and several
thousand dyno pulls. It waited until we were testing our
No. 1 engine before it got sucked down a carburetor
venturi. Everyone felt a little sheepish when further
inspection revealed several more loose weights on the
fan blades.
The point is that we had jumped from faulty assumptions
to erroneous conclusions. We hadn't considered all of
the facts before making a judgment. We wanted tidy
explanations for the problem, so we invented |
them.
Racers want positive results, even if it sometimes
requires jumping through logical hoops to reach them.
When you invest the time and money to test, there is a
strong predisposition to believe that you made progress
- even if that belief requires a little self-deception.
You really want to believe that gear ratio change or the
new camshaft made a difference. But a week later when 35
cars are pounding down the same piece of asphalt, you
may have to confront the reality that your test wasn't
valid and the performance improvement was imaginary.
Years ago I saw a sign on a garage wall that offered
excellent advice: "When the results disagree with
the theory, believe the results and invent a new
theory." Instead, we often distort the results to
support a preconceived theory. A conclusion that is
based on an emotional need will seldom improve a race
car's performance.
For thousands of years, it was accepted as fact that the
sun and planets revolved around the Earth. Religion and
philosophy supported the belief that man was the center
of the universe, and complex theories were devised to
explain the apparent motion of the heavens. But an |
