Jeep Engines - Oljeep

l- -7-7470 MOPAR PERFORMANCE PARTSYou need to ask yourself these questions because no oneelse will. There are some entry level safety precautions, butthese are usually only the bare minimum and in no way dothey make your vehicle as safe as it should be. The theorythat track owners, promoters, etc., use when asked whyracers aren’t required to use proper safety equipment is that“they don’t go very fast.” This is simply not true. Theyforget that these racers are driving at 60, SO, or even 100+miles per hour. Can you imagine driving your vehicle downthe highway and hitting a bridge abutment‘? Well, that’s thesame as hitting a wall at the track, and you can get just asseriously injured.Most racers put a lot of emphasis on their engines and nottheir chassis. This completely ignores safety. It doesn’tmatter if you’re ahead in the point standings or not, if youcrash you’re just as injured. What good does all that workto the engine do if you are unable to survive a crash?Also, too many racers have the attitude, “I’m a good driverand therefore I won’t have a crash.” But the fact is therewill be a point when the other guy will crash or your vehiclewill break, and you will be involved whether you wanted tobe or not. You won’t have a choice. You could be the bestdriver in the world and it wouldn’t matter. At one time oranother, you will be involved in a crash.There are several things you can do to make your race vehicleas safe as possible, and many of them don’t cost a dime. Also,many of them have a hidden performance advuntuge,allowing you to perform better at the track as well as makingyou as safe as possible. These items will be coveredindividually following this introduction, but first, it isimportant to recognize several critical area3 involving safety.One of the most important is driver compartment roll overprotection; in other words, you’d like to have, in the case ofa bad crash, pieces of the race vehicle everywhere on thetrack, but the driver completely untouched in a little“cocoon.” It takes a lot of time and energy to make thatdriver’s compartment safe. Some people will tell you tosimply put the driver in what would amount to as a cast iron“survival cell,” and then build the vehicle around that. Thistheory just isn’t true. If the driver was sitting in a little castiron pod, he would get injured, and more than likelyseverely. What you need to do is use controlled crush toabsorb or “manage” the energy; that is, let the vehicleexpend all it’s kinetic energy bending itself up to the pointwhere it just reaches the driver and then stops. Other areasof concern include keeping the driver in the driver’scompartment, and the danger of flying debris within thedriver’s compartment. This takes a lot of engineering and alot of expertise, and is one of the reasons we suggest thatyou have your roll cage constructed by a reputable,professional chassis builder.On top of all this, the most critical area (and the biggestdanger) is fuel. You’ve got to manage the,fiiel-contain it andmanage it. For this there are fuel cells, which are steel enclosedrubber bladders that can deform in case of a crash andhopefully offer some puncture resistance. Even if the bladdersdo puncture, the fuel will drip out at a very slow, controllablerate, as opposed to engulfing the vehicle in raw fuel.Another safety area that is not immediately apparent tomost racers is to build a vehicle that handles properly soyou can uvoid an accident. Superior handling, that is,steering, suspension, and brakes, means that the vehiclewill do what you tell it to do-such as drive around anaccident. How many times has someone said, “Well, I hitthe brakes but nothing happened,” or “The steering gotloose on me”? If the vehicle is working correctly, that is, itslows down, goes fast, goes straight, goes left and goesright, you will avoid most accidents.The key to being safe is that you have to be single-purposeminded. You’ll see people at the race track who will have afancy trailer and a big expensive motor home-and sixmonth old tires on their race vehicle. But if they wereserious, really serious, they would get rid of thatmotorhome, get themselves an open trailer and a pickuptruck or van, and have Y L ~ W tires on their race vehicle everyweek. Most racers don’t understand this: they get theirpriorities confused. They’ll say, “Well, everyone else has amotorhome, and we don’t want to look like a second rateoperation.” But what do you think they’ll look like on thetrack’? If they’re out there losing races because their tires areold and worn, there’s only one way they will look-foolish.The only person that can make you safe is you. You have tomake the decision to racc as safely as you can so that incase of an accident, undyou will have un uccident, you willbe able to race again.Is it worth being competitive “at any cost” when that costmay be your own life‘? Only you can decide that-noarnount of rules or preaching can ever get you to “dosomething.” You alone have to rnake the choice.