Well, hi there Team Kalitta fans. It’s your resident PR guy checking in with you again. As I am sure you are all well aware, Memphis was a “home track” race for me, so I stuck around for a few extra days after the races to catch up with friends and family and eat…A LOT. I have a few favorite eating establishments in the greater Memphis area that I require myself to visit each time I’m back home. If you are what you eat, then I’m some sorta catfish-pig-fried chicken hybrid swimming in the deep end of a BBQ sauce pool. Now, that I’ve placed that rather disturbing image in your heads, here is something completely different…

At the north end of the spacious Kalitta Motorsports shop is what I call the “racket room”. No, it has absolutely nothing to do with tennis, but it does, as we southerners say, make a lot of racket. It’s the blower dyno room. As you can tell by its moniker, this is the place where we test all of the blowers/superchargers for our cars. When it’s in operation, it kinda sounds like Jim Carrey trying to make the most annoying sound in the world in the movie Dumb and Dumber…well, maybe not quite that bad. It is and odd sound, though. You’ve probably heard it thousands of times yourself, but it’s fairly indistinguishable when it’s combined of the cacophonic cackle of 8,000 horsepower.

While I was making my rounds through the shop this morning with my mug of jitter juice, I saw my friend Clayton “the Moose” Musser, blower specialist on the Mac Tools dragster, in the blower dyno room and was reminded that I had placed a post-it note on my desk about doing a blog on the blower dyno sometime…guess what? Today is blower dyno day!

Seriously, I quizzed Clayton for a few quick seconds and realized it would probably be best to let the Moose give you an explanation of how it all works. So, here’s what Clay just passed along into my Inbox…

On the car, the supercharger is always overdriven, meaning it is spinning at a higher rpm than the motor…anywhere from 30-50 percent faster.  The car idles at about 2,500 rpm, and when Doug presses the go pedal the engine goes to roughly 8,000 rpm in a quarter of a second. Hopefully the blower spins up accordingly with the motor since they’re connected by the blower belt.

The dyno is used to compare one supercharger to another.  It accomplishes this by taking the blower on a simulated run under controlled conditions.  The dyno uses an electric motor to maintain a constant idle speed (2,300 rpm) just before the test run is made.  We use a 350 cu. in.  internal combustion engine to spin an inertial load to 8,000 rpm, which we then apply to the blower thru the use of a sprague. Therefore, you have just made a virtual “run” inside the shop. 

The dyno also measures and records many different values to determine the quality of a supercharger, like inlet air flow (cubic feet per minute [cfm]), temperature and pressure (negative pressure or vacuum), outlet temperature, and pressure (boost). We get all of that info using a Racepak data recorder and a computer just like the ones we use on the real race cars.

Can you tell now why I let the Moose, a graduate of the University of Toledo with a Bachelor of Sciences in Mechanical Engineering degree, explain? He’s very intelligent and well-spoken and my “go-to guy” when I have mechanical questions about the race cars.

Thanks, Moose, for the blower dyno 101!

Todd and the Moose have left the building.