Enduro racing question.

Has anyone setup a 60 gallon fuel cell (obviously inside of the cage) and put air suspension in the rear programmed to adjust the effective spring rate based upon resistance of the fuel gauge? 

To answer your question, No.  My question, Who are you running with that allows 60 gallon fuel cells?

In reply to captdownshift (Forum Supporter) :

Sprint cars used to have up to a 35 gallon tank behind drivers. In part because they used methanol  which roughly gets 1/2 of the fuel mileage of gasoline.  

That would get them deep into a 200 mile race before needing a splash to finish. 
   The weight is the weight and it takes a lot of power to accelerate and stop over 400 pounds.   Not to mention wear on tires etc. 

I joked about putting a 25 gallon cell in the Datsun as that would allow the car to run for over 3 hours.

Back to the original question; you could use airbags to balance the car but as frenchyd points out you'd be dragging around 360lbs of extra weight.

One would have to do the math to see if the timer saved on pit stops was offset by the slower lap times.

In reply to Tom1200 :

My BlackJack carried a 44 gallon fuel tank. The original builder put that big a tank in it to  run the 500 mile race at Elkhart  Lake Without a pit stop.   Because he didn't have anyone he could count on for pit crew.    
     He came in second place partially because he had to race gentle to get the required fuel mileage to finish the race and partially because the really fast guys failed to finish. 

Some series have a 2hour cap before you must switch drivers.  Other series have minimum pit stop times(lemons is 5 mins) on top of forcing a driver switch...so it's totally unnecessary.  Most target a 2 hour fuel window, it's all you need.

It's an interesting idea. My first thought was off road racing. If you're talking Chump/LeMons - check out the rule books. I know Lemons won't let you fit a fuel cell larger than the OEM tank.

We had a 22 gal cell in our 280ZX and could make it 4+ hours in a race without starvation. Long stints are nice, maximizing track time but my brain was definitely mush in at the end of a 3+ hr stint in the summer. Gotta work on driver comfort next.

Unless lemons changed the rules, they do not have a maximum drive time or a minimum pit stop time.

Dragging around 60 gallons of fuel would mean the car could last a lot longer without pitting than the driver.

My car would be able to go 7 or 8 hours with that much fuel.  No thanks!

I like the idea. We run the factory 22 gallon tank with ~3gph consumption. It is really nice not worrying about fueling so much. That's a long time in the car without a stop though. You are going to be dead tired.

ztnedman1 said:

Some series have a 2hour cap before you must switch drivers.  Other series have minimum pit stop times(lemons is 5 mins) on top of forcing a driver switch...so it's totally unnecessary.  Most target a 2 hour fuel window, it's all you need.

Not sure where you got that Lemons rule, but that's not true. No minimum stop time, no maximum stint time and no forced driver switches. We had a guy run a full 7 hr day without a pit(Mini moke with a 23gal cell).

Back when I raced RC boats we used to only have enough fuel for 3-4 minutes running on board since the heats were only 1-2 minutes long. At the nationals they would run an unlimited offshore class with 10 minute heats. I set up my offshore cat with 3 tanks, the stock one in front of the engine and one in each of the pontoons. It worked great and I won one year and was leading by a big margin another year before my engine let go. 

wvumtnbkr said:

Unless lemons changed the rules, they do not have a maximum drive time or a minimum pit stop time.

Huh, they must have changed it again.  The team I was involved with won the previous year in part due to good pit strategy - the car could go a very long time between refueling, so lost time was minimized.

The year I signed up to drive, they had a rule that drivers could not be out for more than one hour.  IIRC our strategy with six (might have been five?) drivers was going to be two drivers switching back and forth for the first six hours, then the next two switch back and forth for six hours, then the final two, and then the first two got back in for the final six hours.

The sucky thing was, our car broke about five laps in.  I stuck around because I was told that about 2-3am there would be teams looking for drivers because nobody wanted to get into the car.  Unfortunately my helmet/suit/etc were locked up in the trailer and they keyholders had all left.  D'oh.