With the recent increase in Silver Crown car count..Was just wondering if anybody is building new,, or are they still mostly older Beast cars..Also was wondering (slow day at the shop) are there any of the old Gold Crown Cars left anyplace or have they all faded off behind the barns to rot.

I noticed a number of newer Maxims and DRC's at Eldora, plus the 6 car is a new for 2016 4 bar Beast car.

Here is another silver crown question. Saturday was the first time I've seen them race. From what I understand, the engines are pretty much open 360s. I noticed some were down nozzles and some weren't. When I looked at the down nozzle heads close, they all seemed to be 410 heads. So are these engines just destroked 410s or is there something different going on?

I don't work on one of the cars, so someone else will probably have a little better answer on bore/stroke combinations to get to the max of 360 ci specified in the rules.

They used to have to be a cast iron block. I just checked the rules and see this has changed, but if you run an aluminum block, you have to bolt an additional 35 lbs to the chassis on each side of the engine.

The accessories on the front of a lot of the engines are different than a typical sprint car engine to allow for the starter shaft. Normally on a sprint car the water pump is driven off the front of the crank and the oil pump drives off the cam. Because the starter shaft on a champ car has to engage the front of the crank, a lot of the cars run belt drive water and oil pumps to make room for it. The other way around this is to run an onboard starter on the back of the engine, but it takes up a lot of space in the cockpit and adds weight.