anyone know how much a jalopy fuel tank holds? based on the assumption the stock fuel tank of the '32-'40 tanks were located in the vulnerable rear of the rear axle, and rules either mandated or suggested, the fuel tank be moved to a more amidship location and possible the real estate less due to roll cage bracing and perhaps a relocated battery, too. i know there would be pit stops along the race for anything of interesting duration, but how much would the driver have to start the race? thanks sid
if i knew what it was, i would need to ask. didn't you learn there are no dumb questions? just dumb . . . never mind. but if i were not this dumb, you just might not look that smart. but as long as you have the class's attention, perhaps you would like to demonstrate you arithmetic prowess. if i have a cylindrical tank , the dimensions being 10" diameter, 20" long, and filled 100% full with [in this case gasoline] how much gasoline would it hold. don't know how much mileage a roundy round race car would get, but let's say 5 miles per gallon. how many laps could it make before pitting for gas? thanks in advance, sid
The cylinder you describe (10" diameter, 20" long) would hold 6.8 gallons, according to this online Tank Volume Calculator.
When I was a child attending the races at Lebanon Valley Speedway, in the era when racing of this sort was transitioning from flatheads to overheads, the norm was to use beer kegs, 15 gallon size. Mounted in the trunk above the frame rails tucked between the rear rollcage braces, assumed to be adequately protected. Yes there were fires! My friend Jim spent 6 months in a burn ward after one such incident midsummer 1962. Usually the keg mostly survived, but what seemed to be the weak spot was the filler, somehow attached to the keg at the bung hole. Most likely it would have been just a short section of pipe sized to fit the hole, with a coupling screwed to it, and a plug with a piece of rebar welded or brazed, depending on the pipe plug material, to form a handle. And then just hammered into the bung hole. Not many people could weld on aluminum, and those seem to have been used the most.
that's terrible. i've been watching tons of YT videos of old stockers and every driver interviewed after a crash mentions how lucky he was to get out because either fire did not happen, or it just licked his heels as he fell out of the car. even the announcers mention the F word as the crashes happen. scary stuff, that.
Late 60s and the first car I had, I bought (and mom was NOT happy) while in high school, sophomore year. It was a 57 Chevy and had a keg in it made that way. Bought a rougher one for the parts, 55 Ford, same thing. The first 3 cars I helped on, same thing. Fuel cells were not required until mid 70s. And even then the rules allowed things called fuel cells that had no outer metal containers. I used a 40 gallon sprint car tail tank, made of HDPE and no inner bladder in my modified. And it was held in with railroad banding fastened in with homemade turnbuckles. It never came loose, so I guess we just got lucky.
A 40 gallon tank would hold over 250 pounds of gasoline. Did you really want that much weight in your car?
Well, we ran methanol, roughly 6-3/4 pounds per gallon. So approximately 270 pounds hung over and behind the rear axle. No, not the best place for that much weight. But being a sprint car tail tank, it kept a considerable amount behind and below the rear axle. The trick was to try to set the car up for the end of the race, if we could guess what the track was going to be like. And we tried to fill it up with as much fuel as we could squeeze in it. The night I had 5 gallons of nitro, the rest methanol, gave us about a 12% nitro blend. Our little injected 350 gained 100-120 hp that night. And ran through the fuel in 33 laps of the 35 lap feature! Led 94% of the race, just not the most important part… But to say that it had 40 gallons, no, probably only 39+. May have had a little bit of an air gap on top. I can’t imagine what a dirt champ car with a 65 gallon tank must handle like at the start of a 100 lapper on a mile track!
jeebus. may as well just light the fuse and get it over quick. nitro + methane + gasoline . . . ka-pow!
No gasoline except for starting cold. Then it’s just a squirt down each injector. Probably why the filters were off here.
oh . . . so the methanol was the majority of the mix. hell; i still wouldn't want to be sittin' on top of the mix.
On most dirt tracks what you are calling Jalopies the heat races or main weren't that many laps. At least not in Central Texas in the 70's. You just needed a tank that held enough to finish the longest racee you figured to run in.
For most oval track racing,between 5 to 10 gal. was enough=tanks were used,before fuel cells,that were often 5 gal jerry cans{ WW2 left over stuff was every were,and Jerry cans were tuff,so pretty safe at the time;; If got the "Q" wrong,I also got "A"... I'm old an raced before fuelcells were in the rules..
Most of the time it was straight methanol. The nitro was given to me by a friend from the Berkshires who raced a funny car in the late 60s and 70s. He ran a speed shop and I was a customer there from the time I was 15. I also raced modified class snowmobiles, with Ed Wynn Tillotsen carburetors set up for methanol. Try starting a Rotax Blizzard engine on methanol in the winter! Anyway, the drag racer knew that I bought methanol by the 55 gallon drum, and asked me if I would sell him 5 gallons occasionally. Instead I just gave it to him. There was always a bit more than I could use in the snowmobile days. And in the long term, it paid off with dividends! One benefit being that 5 gallon can of nitro. I was also getting parts from him for cost. Funny thing about methanol, it’s not explosive like gasoline. And water soluble, so to put it out in a fire, just use water. It doesn’t take much to make it non combustible. Add the nitro, 12% back then in the modified, and it adds about 100 hp. 4th of July one year, the Valley always has fireworks. We had a 55 gallon drum on the back of our truck. West end of the pits by the pond. Fireworks are pretty much always fired off just behind the dirt track on the dragstip. The pits concession stand and the gasoline truck are central in the infield, close to the fireworks. And most of the people in the pits were not going to get anywhere near our dangerous “FUEL”! But they stood there next to the gasoline truck! There wasn’t enough firefighting equipment anywhere around the track if that had gone off! Go figure…
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