NEWS

Stay up-to-date with our progress.

Our Kickstarter Project is Now Live!

Our project is officially live! You can see it by going here: http://kck.st/18xEkT4, or just clicking the Kickstarter link in the title bar above. If you can help, we'd be grateful for your contribution. If not, please help spread the word! We're depending on you to get the Challenger II back to the salt. To all of those of you who've gotten us this far, please know that we are extremely grateful. We're gonna make this thing happen! 

RACER.com Diary 15: Controlled Slip

I have so much left to learn. That, more than anything, is what rebuilding the Challenger II has taught me. We’re in the middle of finalizing the clutch package, and the whole process has proven to be much more complicated and time consuming than expected. Our setup is primarily a modified version of what you’d find on a Top Fuel dragster. We make a lot of power, and run fuel, so we wanted equipment with proven resiliency under those conditions. 

The components themselves are a mix of different materials that you wouldn’t expect to find in the same package. Elements are made from titanium, stainless steel, 4340, 4130, cast iron, and sintered metal (friction material). Bob Brooks of AFT is fabricating the parts. He used to run the piston department of Mickey Thompson Enterprises for my dad back in the 60s, so it’s a real pleasure to have him working with us on this project. 

Getting the clutch package to perform effectively on the salt is a tricky process. Our tires are only 4 inches wide, and each one will be allocated almost 1000hp. Getting all of that power to the ground without slipping the tires requires delicate tuning, and probably won’t be perfected until we actually get to Bonneville and tinker with the settings on the salt.

Here’s how it works: As soon as the car moves away from the push truck, I’ll release the clutch. This will happen at a relatively slow speed. Anything over 5mph should be enough. As engine RPM increases, the clutch will slowly lock up automatically. I won’t be moving it in and out during the run. This means, in simplified terms, that the clutch will mechanically perform a controlled slip at slow speeds. This unusual procedure is important for two reasons. First, our engines are dry blocks, so if I back off the throttle to counter wheel spin, the engines will not get enough fuel to cool themselves. Second, we need to make as much speed as possible on the bottom end of the course, so if we’re goosing back and forth or not making traction, I’ll be loosing irreplaceable time. 

Work continues! See you next week. 

RACER.com Diary 14: The Fastest Guy Out There

In last week’s article I mentioned that Bonneville’s different classes weren’t very meaningful to me, because my foremost goal was to be the fastest piston car on the salt. There isn’t an official designation for that, so I called it “the world’s fastest hotrod”. I stand by what I said, but I probably should have predicted the deluge of questions regarding the actual classifications. For the record, when I run the Challenger II, it will be entered as an AA Fuel Streamliner (FS). That’s not the same category my dad was in when he originally drove the car (he used a supercharger), and my class record is technically lower than his was. But just to emphasize, I don’t really care about winning the class. I want to be the fastest person out there, period. 

Just out of curiosity, I counted up all of the classes and engine combinations available in the four-wheeled category. I came up with 825. I did the same for the motorcycles, and came up with an even larger number. That didn’t seem right, so I called up Van Butler, head of bikes for the SCTA, and he confirmed that there were almost 1000 different class combinations. That may sound confusing, but I think it’s a good thing. If you are an enthusiast interested in coming to the salt, you have zero excuses. There is a category ripe for conquest with your name on it. The slowest bike record sits at 19.983 MPH. The fastest is 376 MPH. With four wheel cars, the gamut is even larger. Get to work! 

The biggest Bonneville event each year is Speed Week. It gets over 600 individual car and bike entries, and is the one that you should attend if you are interested in getting a taste of the salt’s unique culture. There are a few other smaller events during the season, but I’m primarily interested in Cook’s Shootout, which is limited to 8 vehicles, and tends to be populated by very fast streamliners. It’s the only FIA sanctioned event, and the only time I can qualify for an FIA record.

Thank you for all of your questions. Feel free to keep them coming in. See you next week. 

RACER.com Diary 13: 400mph in a Piston Powered Car

How hard is it to go over 400 MPH in a piston powered car? Well, since 1947, only 11 people have managed to do it. That is, for reference, one less than the number of people who have walked on the moon. But things are heating up. For 52 years, the overall record grew by only 8 MPH. Last year, the Speed Demon exceeded that mark by almost a factor of three, and bumped it by a whole 22 MPH. The Treit & Davenport car, a perennial favorite, is running for the first time after 13 years of development. This year, Bonneville will host the largest gathering of 400 MPH+ streamliners in history, and will proffer the most exciting series of salt events in decades. 

Most of those vehicles will be competing in different classes, but to my way of thinking, there is only one real record, and that belongs to the fastest overall piston powered car. There isn’t a specific name for that, but I’ve taken to calling it The World’s Fastest Hot Rod. There are somewhere between 6-8 vehicles with a shot at that title, and I believe that the Challenger II is one of them. 

With that said, jumping in the cockpit and mashing the gas tomorrow would be foolish, no matter how badly I want it. Most of the other LSR cars I mentioned were running for years before they cracked the 400 MPH barrier, let alone challenged the record. Sneaking up on the big number has been the modus operandi of the most successful attempts. The team here at THOMPSONLSR has been working like crazy trying to make Speed Week in August. Right now, that date is looking unrealistic given the amount of testing I want to do. There isn’t any room for mistakes at these speeds, so we’ll be trying for runs at the World Finals in October. My current goal for this year, frustrating as it is, will be to make sure that all the functions and safety mechanisms are up to snuff before I gas it. 

See you next week.

RACER.com Diary 12: Ones and Zeros

Throughout the update, we’ve taken pains to ensure that the Challenger II stays old school. But we’re traditionalists, not Luddites. Electronic systems are a major component of contemporary racing, and our team has embraced that. Leading this effort is Donny Cummins of RacePac, a really smart guy with a proven product. He’s been collaborating with A/Fuel Dragster guru Jerry Darrian to come up with our engine monitoring system. 

As those of you who’ve been following us for a while know, the Challenger II is a four-wheel drive vehicle with dual engines. The power plants interface with each other via Hadley Boxes, which are basically bespoke gearboxes that mechanically balance output. Given that the two engines are being built of identical parts by the same group of people, they should be perfect doppelgängers. But they’re not, and that’s where the electronics come into play. Donny’s products allow us to measure twenty different variables simultaneously and identify even minute inconsistencies. That data helps us maintain uniformity during the run, and reduces the load on the Hadley Boxes, which rely on difficult to repair metal gears rather than easily rebootable ones and zeros. 

We also have the ability to monitor the status of the chassis. This is absolutely essential, as its characteristics will change markedly over the course of the run. For instance, at the starting line, the nose of the car will contain nearly sixty gallons of nitro blend. By the five mile mark, most of that volume will be gone, reducing the vehicle’s curb weight by over five hundred pounds. If everything is going well, we’ll be going over 400 mph at that point, every yard of which will cost us front traction in the form of reduced weight. If we don’t properly compensate for that with aerodynamic down force, we’ll be in a world of trouble. The electronic monitoring, in combination with extensive testing, will allow us to fine tune the adjustments necessary to predict changes in the car’s attitude and lift over the course of the run. 

In short, although Donny may not have been around in 1968, we’re very glad that he’s here now. As the struggle for sponsorship continues, we’ve been exploring a different approach that we’ll discuss in the next article. See you then!

RACER.com Diary 11: Old School Aluminum

The design and engineering of the original Challenger II was a close collaboration between my dad’s crew of hand-picked drag racing guys and Ford’s in house Kar Kraft team. The point man at Kar Kraft was Ed Hull, who you might recognize from some of Ford’s more spectacular projects, including the GT40 Mark IV. The two groups had gigawatts of brainpower, but they also had a lot of practical experience, which lead directly to some of the Challenger II’s more superficially confusing features, including the segmented aluminum skin. 

The credit for that goes to Nye Frank (a hero of mine), who had worked on Craig Breedlove’s Spirit of America, and was constantly frustrated by the need to remove large portions of body work in order to perform simple maintenance or repairs. The subdivided architecture of the Challenger II means that almost all areas can be accessed quickly and independently by popping a few Dzus buttons, an advantage that we’re counting on to make the FIA’s mandated one hour turnaround. To see it in action, have a look at the video underneath this article. 

I’m often asked if the sheet metal work is original, and the answer is an emphatic yes. The body was crafted by Tom Jobe and Nye Frank over forty-five years ago, and is an absolute work of art. The only changes so far have been the relocation of an air intake and a 32 inch extension to the tail section on the recommendation of our aerodynamicist Tim Gibson. Matching the existing work meant finding old school talent, and we were fortunate to locate Terry Hegman, who is one of the world’s last truly gifted aluminum men. As a fellow fabricator, seeing his work each week leaves me green with envy. 

When you look at the flowing lines of the streamliner, it’s impossible not to see it as a thing of beauty. From above, it looks like it’s breaking records standing still. If I were building a new car from scratch, there’s no question that I’d be using carbon fiber instead of aluminum, but I really don’t think I’d get the same overwhelming sense of craftsmanship. When I look at the Challenger II, I’m reminded a little bit of Apollo 11, which launched about a year after the streamliner’s rained out test run. It’s got a real sense of adventure about it, and I like it that way.