So this week at the Bonneville Salt Flats has done what it usually does. It gets our brains spinning at like 8,900rpm and we want to build some sort of bizarre freakshow car or truck to come out and compete in the BangShifty way. Stealing a page from a crazy custom truck we saw cruising on the salt with a radial engine, we want to buy these two Whitney Twin Wasp 14-cylinder jobs and build a push-me, pull-me salt killer. Rated at something like 800hp a piece, these were the engines used to power airplanes like the B-24 and the DC-3 transport plane. They were the highest volume piston airplane engine ever produced with over 173,000 made in the 1930s and 1940s.
As loud as the nitro burning entries at Bonneville are, a twin radial engine will be the most earsplitting thing to hit the salt in a half century or more. Sure these things are a pain in the ass to service, probably leak like a sieve, and would be complete and utter hell to engineer into a automotive power plant but let’s think about this for a second.
Getting your hands on a 1970s Cadillac and making a four wheel drive land speed racer with one engine facing forward and driving a front axle with the second mounted about where the trunk would be facing “backwards” and driving the rear axle. We’re totally negotiable on the body style but 1,600hp and noise for days would rule all, especially if the exhaust were done like some of the European radial pulling tractors which have little zoomies on each exhaust port.
The bore and stroke on these engines is 5″ by 5″, they use two rows of seven cylinders, and each displaces 1,829ci. So yea, our freak would be in AA. The highest performance versions of these engines used a centrifugal blower and produced 1,200hp. We’d be on the line with ProCharger pretty quickly to see what we could figure out.
In the history of bad ideas, this may be one of our best.
Check out the photos and then hit the eBay ad link below –
Power wash, a little spray paint and put them in the Bangshift museum.
So…. you have thought about this quite a bit. Ah… Cooling these beasts might be problematic in your proposed application. Best to Leave them for the DC-3 guys.
Put them in a giant copy of the wild Carbonite streamliner. They could sit in extended pods before the rear wheels and a fan attached to the front of the motors should cool them OK. Power would be transmitted to the wheels through a coupling running into a transmission able to handle all that torque. All I need now is to rob a bank to get the build money together – unless you lads want to make a “donation”…
What would that class designation look like?? AA/PPVRFSC…..?
expensive Greek paperweights
Make a machine with 4 roller wheels and bolt the motors on pods left and right with constant speed propellers and use the enormous thrust to see if you can blow past about 250mph.