Major thanks to Tim Lenahan and his 800mm lens for snapping these photos of Blowfish spinning at Bonneville last week. When Tim asked if we wanted them we of course said yes, and are now sharing them with you because we are cool like that. Blowfish, which is usually a super stable car, was captain of the spin squad at Bonneville Speed Week this year and spun everywhere from the starting line to the 5 mile at one point or another, according to witnesses. Rumors were flying that the car was wrecked after spinning off the push truck, and other reports said it spun and flipped at the 3 mile mark. None of those things were true apparently, but close calls were aplenty. We’ve got 18 shots of the trunk lid launching spin, and we’re putting a couple here in the blog item and all of them in a mini gallery.
Big thanks again to Tim Lenahan for getting us these great shots. We appreciate it. If you want to contribute to all our debauchery here at BangShift.com remember that you can submit stuff too! Send us a note via the submit your content tab and we’ll contact you with directions.
At this point the car should be traveling from right to left in this photo. It is...but the front end isn't pointing in the right direction.
That thing in the air is the trunk lid. I'm real sure the paint wasn't as nice on it after it landed as it is here in this photo, which probably isn't as good as it was before it left the car.
Fuck me!
I’ve spun and crashed at 100mph on a road course…not at 300 plus!
Two Words: Yaw Stability
If that trunk lid had not torn off the car would have become airborne and I can guarantee some very bad things would have happened. We can only hope that they hinge the wing to the deck lid so that it can lift and keep the car from going airborne just in case this happens again. As the chances are big that it will happen again. Scary stuff.
Well boys here’s what really happened to the blowfish- shifting into high gear at about 270 mph the turbo boost limiter malfunctioned , the boost should have come on gradually but the limiter controller failed causing both waste gates to close and the turbo went to max power causing the real wheels to have about 1700 horsepower thrown at it at once , the results were the real wheels spun to about 320 miles per hour while the car was traveling at 270, causing the car to spin out, this car is one of the most air-o-dynamic production cars to ever go down the salt. at these speeds this car has enough down pressure to hold safely, it has made 6 runs of over 300 MPH without any incidents on stability. The blowfish was damaged but not destroyed. I’m someone from the inside that knows what happed. see ya next year.
That account of what happened is not the whole story although most of the info is accurate. After further analisis of the data the boost controller did not fail, we did have a spike in boost at each gear change and that is not uncommon with this car. The problem started earlier in the week with a broken trans and the back-up trans has different gear splits + 5 gear overdrive that was used with a different rear gear set. This only allowed us to use 4 gears and the desired boost from 3rd to 4th was to much of a jump. The data showed us that in 3rd gear the wheel slip was greater than we had ever seen before and when it made the 4th gear shift we overpowered the track. This year was the worst conditions that we had ever experienced along with some new found power and the result was the series of photos above. I will have some pic of the BlowFish after its cleaned up, but it looks like not to much damage.