Reno Air Race progress inhibitors, a thumbnail sketch...
Robert Cumberford, he designed a Biplane that fit the class rules, 290 Cu In max, 75 square feet of area, open cockpit. He designed a beautiful little negative stagger biplane with a Ford 289 on a belt driven reduction drive for a four bladed prop. No, the group said, that's not what we want and changed the rules to Lycoming 290 series engines.
Lee Mahoney came with a beautiful O-290 powered all metal negative staggered biplane with cantilever wings and no cabane struts. No, you have to have cabane struts and interplane struts and he was relegated to last place. it is Sorceress. Later he sold it and that pilot successfully got it accepted and several other racers were built on Midget Mustang fuselages and one really cool airplane called hot Kanary, but eventually they were all banned by requiring cabanes again.
Richard Minges designed a small Unlimited in the early 70's with a Ranger inverted V-12 770 Cu In engine with turbos to race, he was killed in a mid air with other T-6's during a race but the small Unlimited grew with John Parker's line of small designs and then the Pond racer set the world on it's ear with it's 401 mph qualifying speed on 500 hp. It unfortunately crashed but the next guy with a plan was David Rose, with his Biplane already banned by rewriting the rules requiring his sesquiplane wing's area to be redistributed to equal on both planes (he continued to win, anyway), putting forth a design for a small unlimited that so incensed the Unlimited crowd (read Class President Art Vance that only had a stock Mustang and never even ran water injection so this holding more weight that it is really just a Warbird Race) that the rules were changed to introduce a minimum weight requirement to make any low horsepower, lightweight airplane uncompetitive and now with this requirement, illegal.
The Sport Class, neat and new. In 1998 it was introduced and became a hit all at once. I signed up for the first Pylon Racing School just to get involved in this high powered F1 class and I saw huge potential and promise. Oh no, Chris. This will not be, you are so wrong. This is going to be the already established home made kit plane class. New designs need not apply. So much so wee the restrictions that it took the likes of Jon and Tricia Sharp to come up with a legal kit that was a real competitive racer and their 5 kits sold at fiesale price of $129,000 were so expensive I couldn't compete. After Jon and Tricia had 5 years and who knows how much dough extracted from their lives they gave up and retired from racing about the time that the rules were finally, and much too late because a lot of the momentum was gone, for single seat, homebuilt racers of 1,000 cubic inch.
Far too late for my one off carbon racer, using a cowling and nacelle mold from another project and a dozen Lycoming GO-435 surplus engines from DM bought for pennies on the dollar pumped up by my genious fabricator with a GM 7-61 blower on a belt drive. My small time deal needed a rules interpretation that allowed huge leeway, and we could've made it a two seater, with the definition of a kit as a 3-view and a bucket of resin. The class pitted racers against cruiser companies that had produced kits to the masses for 20 years before, making it damn near impossible for a new airplane that was a racer to be created. They essentially killed Tommy Rose (control linkage failure in approved kit provided part) and ruined a bunch of Questaire Ventures by sticking to forcing multi-seat cross country cruisers into pylon racers (landing accidents from it's weird little landing gear and the rough and unmaintained runways at Stead). Too bad, I loved Tommy and he was one of the big reasons Laura went to the races. Poor Jon and tricia, all of that effort for little after they achieved their personal goals of winning and setting the records they did that still stand today, but I'm sure they saw the class growing into much more knowing Jon's original idea being the Grand Prix Class.
But that's just me, one guys opinion through one set of eyes...
Chris...
Topic: Reno on TV (Read 6115 times)