MORE TUBULAR TALES?
Patience is a virtue in
most cases, but for crew chief Brian Corradi it isn’t – at least when it comes
to the safety of his driver.
Corradi, crew chief for
Mike Ashley’s Gotham City Racing team, along with co-crew chief Mark Oswald, have retained the services of Dr. Rory
Davis as well as Chuck Haase to test the safety of their chassis.
Corradi said they’ve delivered
a chassis already to Haase for a stress analysis this week.
“They are just testing to
see where we can improve on it,” Corradi said.
John Force is at least one
team that has said they plan on building their chassis in-house. Corradi said
Ashley’s
Mike Ashley crew
chiefs Brian Corradi and Mark Oswald step forward with chassis safety testing …
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Patience is a virtue in
most cases, but for crew chief Brian Corradi it isn’t – at least when it comes
to the safety of his driver.
Corradi said they’ve delivered
a chassis already to Haase for a stress analysis this week.
“They are just testing to
see where we can improve on it,” Corradi said.
John Force is at least one
team that has said they plan on building their chassis in-house. Corradi said
Ashley’s
“If we can help to make
these cars safer as a whole, for the class, we will,” Corradi said. “That’s our
goal. We have no interest in building our own cars at this time.”
Corradi said it was necessity that has pushed his team to seek answers.
What prompted us to do this is we aren’t getting any answers from anybody. Nobody is doing it for us, so we are going to have to do it ourselves. That’s how we look at it. Nobody has come over here telling us what we should to and basically we are under the assumption that people can use this information. Dr. Davis is going to help us out. - Mike Ashley Crew Chief Brian Corradi
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Corradi said that Ashley
is having new chassis built at this time under the guidance of Murf McKinney
using normalized tubing.
“The new spec will be
.095, inch-and-a-half tubing bottom and top, normalized,” Corradi said. “It is
basically the same car with a heavier upper and lower frame rail. We are going
to start there.”
The NHRA has legalized a
new chassis specification for the Top Fuel division and labeled it as SFI Spec
2.3N and it will become effective as of April 21, 2008. The gives all teams the
opportunity to have new cars or existing ones brought into spec by the NHRA
Southern Nationals in Atlanta, Ga.
However, the Funny Car
spec has yet to be announced as of the posting of this article. The forthcoming
spec is expected to be a carbon copy of the Top Fuel SFI Spec 2.3N.
Corradi pointed out the
chassis that is at Haase’s shop is the one that Ashley drove in 2007 up until the
“We are going to put the
frame rails in it,” Corradi said. “We are going to see how it reacts and then
make changes according to that. We are going to find out where the real problem
is. We just don’t know what the real problem is at this time.”
Corradi said he’s still in
the dark if there has been any testing done by the NHRA.
“We’re waiting and waiting
and waiting,” Corradi said. “We have to race shortly.”
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