"Frank Nye" loudbang, that would be "Nye Frank" (formerly of Peters and Frank "Freight Train fame) as detailed in your post #17 Driven by Bob Muravez (aka Floyd Lippencott Jr). Like most streamliners it was heavy and hard to work on between rounds and as such quite often ran without the body. There was also a Pulsator II that Frank co owned with George Klass (of drag racing photo archive fame) but that car always ran with a simple shorty body. Read about them here: http://twotogo.homestead.com/ttghistory.html Roo
"Jocko Johnson" See post #20 for the details on this car. Jocko simply designed the body. As seen in this photo Frank Cannon was the driver. Here is the same body on the Jungle Four car (Mooneyhan, Jackson, Furgeson and Faust) as detailed in the original post. Roo
Chet Herbert Beast III Never a drag race car, only Bonneville. Chet did start out with drag race cars but all of his later efforts were for the salt flats--Beast's III and IV. Roo
Cannot believe nobody posted pics of Ed Cortopassi's "Glass Slipper" One of the first, and most impressive "streamliner" type dragsters ever IMHO !
Roo, Chet's biggest successes drag racing were with his Beast I, the fuel Harley. The Beast I took quite a few top eliminator trophies at Santa Ana in the 50's.
I was working at Breedlove's shop (along with Nye Frank) when this car was built (funded by Shell Oil). The engine was a loaner from Al Sharp, and featured one of the first set of his Aluminum hemi heads. The engine was a 354". Craig only made a few passes with the car (most of them at the Hot Rod meet at Riverside Raceway). The car had the very first set of Goodyear Drag Slicks (literally) and they were like racing on grease. Goodyear learned very quickly about softer tire compounds for drag cars, but by that time this car was sitting in the shop for good. As far as the front wheel "pants", Nye made sets for several other dragsters at the time. One of the issues with these pants was that they were very sensitive to airflow, meaning that if the driver used the steering wheel very much on the top end, the car tended to make "immediate" turns in that direction, just like the rudder on an airplane. A little scary, which is why Nye never used them on the original Pulsator... Tried some zoomies, too...
The pictures of Re-Entry during and after the crash at Indy in '66 brought back memories of seeing it happen. It was way ahead of it's time and absolutely beautiful. But rear engine technology had not been ironed out at the time and he paid the price.
Have read that this became the Breedlove car above - also read that it was only a wind tunnel exercise. Hope George Klass will set the story straight.
Couple more This one count LOL TV Tommy Short lived streamliner. Looked good but air and tire rubber kept building up in the rear tire enclosures. They tried cutting holes etc but nothing worked so they moved on from this car.
Dennis, this hard-wood model was used for wind tunnel testing only. It was kind of a mix between Breedlove's future dragster and Nye Frank's dual Chevy car. We had the use of Lockeheed's wind tunnel because one of their air duct engineers (Walt Sheehan) was also on our LSR team for the jet car. Breedlove had several wind test models built over the years for all of his cars (by a guy named Art Russell). The majority of the info we got from the tunnel tests were usually zero, it was pretty well useless for vehicles traveling on a surface (such as on the salt flats or drag strip). The wind tunnel was designed to be used for airplanes, with air going over, under and around an object, not one that traveled on the ground. There was no provision for the "ground effect". Walt Sheehan was the designer of the air intakes for the F-104 fighter jet, a super sonic plane, and what works for air ducts for super sonic air is not what works for sub-sonic air. In the end, we got very little practical information from the wind tunnel tests.
George, that is the big problem with wind tunnels that don't have a moving ground plane. You may learn a little about airflow over some surfaces but unless the wheels are rotating and the ground moving underneath them the data is skewed. I have been in the GM wind tunnel several times testing funny cars which are probably one of the worst cases for getting accurate numbers. Aside from the lack of moving ground plane there is also the fact that the attack angle of the car does not change with tire growth as it does in the real world (we partly compensated by putting blocks under the slicks to add some rake but again--not the real world). In real life the slicks get tall and relatively narrow and they also churn up the air under the rear of the body. In addition the rapidly expanding exhaust gasses from the headers must have a huge influence on the airflow down the sides of the body. John Force Racing had the right idea for finding out what the airflow looked like under the body as they wool tufted the surfaces and mounted cameras to record the results while actually running the car down the track. In addition the GM tunnel only runs at about 130 mph and a computer program was used to come up with 300 mph downforce numbers. The last time that I was in the GM tunnel was with a Monte Carlo funny car body that we used to try some concepts, some of which were eventually incorporated into the Impala that followed. Some other "rule of thumb" ideas that I tried turned out to have absolutely no positive effect. Maybe current CFD software is better but there is no substitute for a proper moving ground plane tunnel as used by all of the Formula 1 teams. Roo
Agreed, Roo. For us, the biggest issue was that in our testes, the vehicle (the model) was not moving and the air was. No problem with that provided that the vehicle in real life is operating in the same environment (as with an airplane). In our real life situation, the air AND the ground were stationary, and the vehicle was moving. There is a natural boundary layer of air on a flat surface of the earth, approximately from the ground up to about 4-feet. This layer of air completely covers the height of our car on the salt flats (other than the rear fin) and apparently behaves differently than the air layer above it. The funny part of all of this is we had three scientists from NASA on the salt with us, trying to get data on this. They were there because Lyndon Johnson, who was president at the time, wanted to introduce VERY high speed trains to the nation (400 MPH) and NASA had no real data on high speed ground based vehicles. Our car was set up with multiple strain gauges to record "lift" forces and they checked out the printouts after every run (we made 36 runs total). At real high speeds (above 550 MPH, our jet car was pulling wheel stands, the air passing over and around the rear fin was creating so much drag it was lifting the front end off the ground, because the drag was behind the rear axle. There was zero downforce or weight on the front wheels, and Breedlove was not happy about it. We eventually fabbed up some horizontal fins to try and bring the nose down, which worked to some extent, but also created additional drag. This photo tells all. Note that the fin is behind (cantilevered) the rear axle. The drag on the fin gets to the point of pushing down on the rear of the car, which then pivots the front of the car up (like a teeter-totter). Two smaller fins in the rear, set horizontally, would have been better. We did set the LSR record in '65, at 600.608 MPH (an average of two runs, one in each direction), and came out at the end of the flying mile at about 640 MPH on the last run the car ever made.
I had mentioned that we had to fab up some horizontal canard fins to counteract the front end lifting. These be them, and they were aimed down several degrees lower than shown here at a car show after the record runs were in the books. Some of the lift was also due to "aero lift", the air going over the top of the canopy and air duct. This is why Breedloves's next LSR car was narrow in the front (basically shoulder width) to avoid all those issues. We never had any of those problems with the original 3-wheeled jet car.
If you were going to build a singe engine jet car, this might be the best design. Breedlove running at Blackrock, NV. Same single J-79 with afterburner as was in the blue 1965 car. Narrow, the dual front wheels still give you a 4-wheel design, no large lift areas over the top of the car (intake ducts are on the sides), no real flat surfaces, and no huge fin sticking up in the back (three smaller fins if you count the rear wheel pants). All it takes is about $4 or $5 million and a lot of guts. If you are ready, I can give you Craig's cell phone number...
Do you know if there was any aero testing done on the Force cars during his Ford sponsorship period? There were a couple of his cars that sat around the building I was stationed at during my stint as an on-site engineer at Ford, but I have no idea what , if any, testing was done with them.
This all GREAT STUFF. This is what makes the HAMB special the memories and history of our guys. This is why I spend my time finding and posting photos to hear stories like this from our members.
Its not about streamlining, more so "air managment" you have so much air around the car that you can not get rid of, so you make it work for you.
Was the front wheel well opening one of the things they found it the wind tunnel testing on the funny car bodys? They rolled the leading edge in on the back of the wheel well.
The Jalopy Journal
