Making Them Fast
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
A talent for bringing out the best in a carburetor has evolved into a national business that is spreading to other countries as well.
Super Stock and Super Comp racer Gary Stinnett has a name that is well known in the racing world — not just for the two world and 10 division championships he has won, but for the carburetors, engines and transmissions that Stinnett Automotive & Racing has developed for other racers.
“That’s the problem of taking your hobby and turning it into a business,” Stinnett said. “You can take what you used to love as a passion and turn it into work. ...
Stinnett opened a vehicle repair shop in the mid-1980s, when the telephone book listed about 55 similar shops. He raced as a hobby and his mounting wins began to draw attention to his abilities as a mechanic.
“As I had success on the race track, then other racers started approaching me,” Stinnett said.
Soon, he had enough race work to do that standard passenger vehicles were forced to take a back seat. By 1996, he’d hired Jason Ruge to take care of the auto-repair work.
“He probably only did that less than a year before I brought him over to do the racing work,” Stinnett said. Then he hired Luke Seibert to help. He’d found that one satisfied customer begets more.
“They bring like five at one time,” he said. “It goes in spurts like that until you run out of his friends.”
But those friends also have friends, which makes Stinnett’s business an ever-growing one. Often, racers want him to build entire drive trains “from scratch.” Engines range from $15,000 to $40,000; carburetors cost about $1,200, and transmissions run from $3,000 to $5,000.
Most of the business, however, is repair work from across the United States, Mexico and Finland.
Now FedEx delivers carburetors and other components regularly to Stinnett’s shop on Lantern Lane; in emergencies, they have been shipped overnight to his home. At the shop, each is dismantled to sit on it own individual shelf or stand, waiting for Stinnett and staff to refresh or rebuild them.
The process is a tedious one. Engines needing work are dismantled into pieces and parts so they can be cleaned, straightened, machined, ground, and anything else that will bring the components back into a state as near perfection as possible.
Stinnett’s shop hosts a bevy of state-of-the-art machines that aid in that goal. Crankshafts are one of the first targets, and Stinnett has a new machine that uses black light to show any minute cracks that a human eye would miss. Cylinder blocks and valves undergo refurbishing in a new dishwasher-type machine, where they are washed ultrasonically in 160-degree soapy water, then rinsed clean. Manifolds and heads are cleaned, rods get rounded and straightened and a new CBN cutter corrects defects in the heads. Cylinder blocks are honed and valves seats are remachined “so valves seal perfectly,” Stinnett said.
Stinnett said, he wants all of the parts spotless when the time-consuming re-assembly begins.
Once complete, he takes the engines to the Dynomometer room for testing. Stinnett controls the machine from a room protected with bullet-proof glass.
“Then we can do full-out passes like they were going down the drag strip,” Stinnett said. He is able to simulate a load on the engine from the control room and get a computer readout that tells him what he needs to know about engine efficiency, revolutions per minute, horsepower, and other essential functions. Then, he can make the adjustments that will give the engine peak performance.
The readout also allows him to tell the engine’s owner at what rpms the gears should be shifted to get maximum speed.
It’s an art as much as it is a skill. With other race shops similarly equipped, the difference in race-track success may lie in Stinnett’s being better in tune with the the drive train than most mechanics are.
An engine he recently had been working on showed an output of 752 horsepower. That was good, though with a little tweaking, Stinnett had boosted the horsepower to over 811. But that was a small engine. Drag racers now expect about 1,300 horsepower, and run 150 to 200 mph on a quarter-mile strip. Parachutes are needed to help stop the cars at the higher speeds.
“We’ve had over 17 customers win world championships with our carburetors,” Stinnett said.
“The carb meters the fuel and the air to go into the engine and it is the throttle valve that controls the amount of air and fuel that enter the engine.”
The more meticulous the blend, and the better synchronized it is to the transmission, the better and faster the vehicle will run. And an engine needs a perfect blend when it’s running 200 miles per hour on a race track and the tachometer is hitting 10,000 rpms.
Stinnett has designed and machined some of his own parts, which has developed into sideline of sorts. Manufacturers began calling him to get specs for race-car parts. That led to an identifiable “S” being added to some after-market manufacturers’ parts, and now a “Stinnett Signature” series is under way.
When he reflects now on the 55 vehicle repair shops listed in the mid-1980’s telephone books and the handful of shops listed now — and with every engine that goes out the door with a shiny Stinnett Automotive & Racing chrome valve cover — he knows he made the right decision to specialize in race cars.
“The (production) cars don’t break now,” he said. Fuel injectors have replaced touchy carburetors and vehicles now should run 100,000 miles without major repairs.
Then he laughed.
“It’s probably a good thing that my business has changed. I might not be in business today.”