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New Dodge Cup engine in development, could appear before season's end
By SceneDaily Staff
Saturday, July 12, 2008
Tommy Wheeler, the engineering services director at Gillett Evernham Motorsports, says the new Dodge engine for the Sprint Cup Series could make its debut before the end of the season.
The original rollout plan was to begin phasing the engine in this summer, but Wheeler says development is "progressing as much on
schedule as any new development program ever is." Wheeler expects the engine to be ready to go full time for the 2009 season,
well before its NASCAR-mandated debut of 2010.
“The implementation is the biggest challenge because we don’t have the luxury [to switch between the current and new R6P8 engine] due to the way the engine is going to be mounted in the car, the plumbing and all the other ancillary-type parts,” said Wheeler.
Wheeler said that the motor could be used in as many 10 races this year but not in the car of a Chase contender. “We don’t have the option of racing at Charlotte in October and then the very next week not racing it with the same car.
“Once we kind of go down that path of saying, ‘Yes, we’re going to race this [engine] in Elliott Sadler’s Best Buy machine,’ we don’t have the provisions of waffling on those types of decisions beyond that if we’re going to use that car again,” he said.
Wheeler predicts about 500 engines a year will need to be built to furnish six Sprint Cup teams.
“It’s a pretty big undertaking,” he said. “The thing that is most interesting is that we manage a fleet of 100-plus engines that are rebuilt after each race event. Of 100 engines that are in your fleet, approximately 50 percent of those engines are together at one point during the season – which is the beginning of the season. That’s what has got us nervous – making sure that we’re ready and comfortable with the engine.
“I don’t think any engine shop has the capacity to recover from a mistake at the beginning of the season because of the volume of engines you have to put together – Daytona and three West Coast races in a row. It’s a pretty large task at that time of year."
Wheeler is confident that the finished product will be worth all the work, however.
“I feel that we’re very competitive with horsepower,” he said. “We hope that it opens doors that we don’t even know that are there. I have always hoped that it is going to have performance capability. I think the biggest areas where it’s going to be improved is in the water flow and mass – overall weight of the engine. Dodge engineers working with all the Dodge teams have done a great job understanding that it’s very important to have improved coolant flow because of trying to run these engines so hot these days.
“With track position being so important, we’re finding ourselves not wanting to keep the grill as clean we used to because you’re too afraid to lose track position. It’s very resilient. It can handle a variety of operating conditions. I really think that this engine is going to help us with that.”
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