Ken
Thanks for your reply and input. Guys like you and Don who have an interest in the sport help add balance to what might become a one sided soapbox speech. I have been around racing much of my life, I am 67 years old. The mind is still going pretty strong but the old body is slowing down a tad.
My dad owned an automotive machine shop and used to joke about building his old race Flathead Fords out of junk that he swept off of the floor of his shop. He built or machined race engine for many of the local hot shoes like Bill Kimmel Sr., Harry Hyde, and Bill Clarry of Clary's Customotive Speed Shop here in Louisville. He was also friends with a guy named Al Davis, this guy was a genius. He was the guy that built the patterns for the first TQ quick change rear end. He actually built billet crankshafts for the old Crosley motors with nothing more than a 14" South Bend Lathe and an old Bridgeport Mill.
In my Young adult hood I was fortunate enough to become friends with a guy named Ralph Potter through racing Quarter Midgets with him and his sons. He built the Kurtis Quarter Midget that was so dominant in quarter midget racing from the late 50's to the 70's. He sold the Quarter Midget operation off and went back to racing Full Midgets. One of his first midgets was a VW rear engine design that USAC definitely did not like. Suffering through the VW phase of Midget racing Ralph decided that there must be a better way to build a race engine. His next engine to develop was the little Chevy V6. He spent a great deal of time and money making this little engine competitive. The culmination of his efforts was Tony Stewart's first ever national title in the USAC National Midget Division. USAC in their wisdom decided the little V6 had too much going for it and went about making rules to take away the edge from it. Ralph kinda of lost interest in Midget racing at this point and went on to finish out his racing in the Silver Crown Cars. Seeing all of this unfold I guess is what has caused me to to have a dislike of well intended rules meant to help the racer out.
Ralph financed his Midget racing with the help of 5 very successful Muffler Shops he and his son's run up in Indy. He was also my business mentor and helped me start a shop down here in Louisville. The advice he gave me on advertising was to never spend more than 10% of your gross on advertising unless you were advertising on a race car.
That brings me back to me and Mini Sprints. A big reason Ralph got out of racing was the cost involved in building a competitive race car. I knew that if it was hard with 5 gang-buster shops it would be impossible to do with one so so shop. When my son got old enough to start thinking about racing we tied up with a friend Bill Felker and his son Tony "AJ" racing 600cc upright Mini Sprints. That was a race car that I could afford to race and race right. The 600cc cars were the little brother to the 1200cc Mini Sprints and we were kinda of looked down on. They were powered with the little Honda FII motor, a new compact design with a much more efficient head design than motors in the past. We ventured up to Brownstown Indiana once to race with the 1200cc cars and low and behold AJ finished 5th in the feature with an engine one half the size.
At about this time in the late 90's the 1200cc class was dying a slow death because of the cost of modifying these old boat anchors to be race worthy. They left a lot of room for improvement in those things and this improvement work was expensive costing $10,000.00 + to build a good race engine.
Fortunate for us Mini Sprinters the Japanese chose to develop the 1000cc motorcycle engine next. In 2004 the race began between the bike makers to see who could build the fastest bike and has continued til this day. A stock off the bike 1000cc cycle motor would run circles around these older motors at 1/5 the cost. The reason these little motors were so powerful was all in head design. Your mentions of windows is quite true I have made a lot of them over the years. The advantage to the old sand cast HD midget castings are when you made a hole a good welder and a TIG could close it back up again. With the light weight permanent casting cycle motor the thickness and weight is not there so you just junk it and buy another motor.
In a high performance motor we talk about another "Window". That is the window made by the opening of the intake port and the valve head. Unfortunately this window in an Focus or Echotec is not very large because the port makes almost a 90 degree turn before getting to the valves.
In Quarter Midget racing back in the late 50's a guy named Carl Shoji saw this problem also in the Continental engine used in racing those cars at the time and went about curing it with a piece of steel tubing and a couple of pounds of brass welding rod, correcting the bent port problem and making what was known in the day as a Shoji side valve or side port "AA" motor. They were very very fast.
The the small 4 cylinder 2000cc engines developed today were developed for fuel economy, the manufactures started depending on V6 motors for their performance cars like Mustang and Camaro and yes even the LS Lincoln and Jaguar motors are powered by a 60 degree V6 motor. These motors fall a little outside the displacement deemed acceptable by USAC and other Midget race organizations. for a 4 valve head they set the limited to 2000CC's. The little V8 Sinergy motor is 2000CC's but expensive and to be honest the heads are old school Suzuki Hybusa designs and way out of date.
Auto maker build motors to meet their requirements and not those of some racing organization. It would make sense to me then that the racing groups would work their engine specs around what was currently available from the manufactures instead of working off of 50 year old specifications.
The design of the modern 60 degree V6 necessitates that the intake ports be set in at more vertical angle to the valve angle making for a much bigger window for the intake port, this translates into better Volumetric Efficiency and that translate into more Horsepower for the engine. How much I don't know, but it should be better than the Esslinger and we would be doing this with much smaller and easily controlled valves, this translates into less time and money replacing very expensive valves and valve springs.
Esslinger recognizing that straighter ports improve VE and makes more Horsepower have made a patch for their engines in the form of what they call the "Tall Head Design". By making the head taller they straightened out the intake ports thus making more horsepower. The problem is they still have that one enormous titanium intake valve to pass all of that intake charge through and because of this factor they are limited in the amount of improvement they can achieve without going to a larger bore piston.
Our Mini Sprint motors develop 200HP per 1000cc's If we developed our V6 to this stage of tune that would be 600+ Horsepower. I am shooting for 400 or so thus this motor is way below it's potential. With tires available for midgets 600 HP just might be a little overkill and not required. I am sure there would be people that shoot for this 600 mark that is what racers do.
The trick to the hole deal is make it stock block and cylinder head only, maybe allowing welding of the head to make VE a little better yet, for us tinkers. Let the block dictate how much power you can work safely.
The biggest problem I see is much like Ralph's V6 Motors the powers that be>> hopefully not Brian and Harold will regulate the motor out of existence in favor of the people that pay their bills.
Honest Dad himself
