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............................................The Stude's 2006 Changes..
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After Speed Week (2006) we had about 800 lbs. of added weight to the car and Hooley's trailer was overloaded, so we took the Stude to my house in Blanding and put it up on my lift to take the weight out to lessen the load on his trailer going to Oklahoma. While it was up in the air I took these pictures. He actually had the belly pan on last year also. The two tunnels the arrows point to are there to clear the ladder bar suspension.
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Hooley put in a lot of work putting this belly pan on at his house just up on jack stands. I don't think I would have had the patience to do it. The 800+ lbs. of weight is above the arrows over the belly pan. There are two side pockets above the outer arrows and we currently have about 600 lbs. total in them. Jerry Pace with help from John got and made all of the additional weight plates we used this year.
Just above the center arrow and under the front U-Joint there are two large plates that add about 200 more lbs. to the cars weight . Where the weight is located keeps the cars balance about the same (50/50). The weight has to be removed from under the car after the belly pan is removed in these areas. Thus it was a lot easier to do on the lift vs. jackstands.
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Here is the belly pan looking from the front of the car rearwards. Note the 2005 crew's names. We didn't run the belly pan the first year (2004) and have no idea of if it is helping or not.
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Another item Hooley added with the belly pan a year ago was a means to jack the car up. This picture shows the round pipe that the push wheel bar/chute pull bar goes into. Below it is a receiver (see pin) where a bar goes into from below the car to give a jack point (see next picture).
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Here you can see the temporary bar for the jack to push on and on each side of it are two bars that also go through the belly pan that give us a place to put the jackstands. All of these are pinned and come out.
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Here is the center jack support and .................
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...........here are the two supports for the jackstands. Hooley designed a simple yet effective system to raise and support the car with the belly pan in place.
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In an effort to help with the directional stability of the car John enlarged the skirts that go behind the rear wheels under the back quarter panels. The black one is from 2005 and the white shows the added area that the 2006 skirts has.
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Here you can see the enlarged skirt at the rear of the car. In theory they should help keep the car going straight, but we wonder if where they are isn't the best location. We are looking at making a tunnel under the car.
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The last two major modifications to the car for 2006 were in the interest of safety. We got this NASCAR use roof flap from Doug Odom and John modified it and placed it on the roof of the car. The above picture is of the bottom of the roof flap.
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Here is the flap showing it open and before John changed the dimensions of it.
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John took a mold off the roof of the car and then made the top of the roof flap the same so that the curvature of the roof with the flap in it was the same as before.
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Here the flap is installed in the roof. It is activated when ever Hooley pulls the chute release and won't open unless the release is pulled.
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Once it is released a spring pushes it about this far open where it stays as long as the car is going straight. Pushing down on it will re-latch it.
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If the car goes backwards the air will pull it full open. After the run where Hooley spun you could see it went all the way open as it was laying down with one of the cables outside the box. The arrow points to the spring. For next year we might modify it so that the spring opens it a little further just to be sure the air catches it. We are not sure if the flap helped during the spin, but the car stayed on the ground while it was backwards at 223 mph, and that is what we wanted. John did a nice job on this aspect of the car for 2006.
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Hooley also added a "funny car" type addition to the cage inside the car. This picture shows it underconstruction.
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Here all the bars have been added. Before there were no bars to the right of his head and shoulder and not as many to the left, only the back one.
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A view looking into the new cage area.
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A view of the left side showing the additional bars.
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Here Patrick is receiving instructions on his licensing run. Hooley is going to widen the area a little by his shoulders for next year. The new addition to the cage is a little too tight.
Another major change to the car was we improved on data acquisition. Last year we were data logging Air/Fuel and throttle position. This year I helped Hooley in also data logging EGT, Boost, RPM and Acceleration with Innovates Aux Box (LM-3). In addition we added an EGT visual gauge to the dash right in Hooley's view. The addition of these items allowed us to use the first couple runs to fine tune the air/fuel, which I think might have saved us a very expensive motor. I am sold on data logging in a situation like these were you get so few runs a year. Next year we will probably add fuel pressure to the mix and get our own weather station.
Besides what is mentioned above Hooley also had to move a lot of the safety controls (chute release, fire bottles and shifter) so that he could still reach them with the changes to the cage. There were numerous other items that had to be done to the car during the off season. He, John and other friends do a lot of work to the car each year in order to keep improving it for the next year.
..................................Back to Hooley's 2006 Bonneville Experience Story