Beast: The Top Secret Ilmor-Penske Race Car That Shocked the World at the 1994 Indy 500 by Jade Gurss

Author:Jade Gurss [Gurss, Jade]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Octane Press
Published: 2014-05-12T05:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-FIVE

GHOST IN THE MACHINE

IT WASN’T GOING TO WORK

“Never trust a computer you can’t throw out a window.”

— Steve Wozniak, Apple cofounder

Andrew Hurley (a.k.a. Mr. Horsepower) climbed into the rear seat of another of Paul Morgan’s beautiful warplanes, the Harvard. Known as the T-6 Texan when it was built in the United States, the plane was renamed the Harvard for use by the Royal Air Force. Morgan quickly piloted Hurley toward Heathrow to catch a late flight to the States.

Hurley had spent so much time traveling in the past few years, his packing skills had nearly become an art form. Called into Morgan’s office only a few minutes before, he was given five minutes to pack and was now on his way to help solve a problem before a Michigan test.

“I was on the night flight to New York and went straight to Reading where they were sorting out a misfire,” said Hurley. “I got there, helped Karl, and then went to bed for two hours and we went off to the test in Michigan. That was incredible. But we were doing what we needed to do at the time. We always did long days and put a huge amount of effort in, but it got to a crescendo with this program.

“We solved it,” he continued. “But I think a big part of it was Paul wanted to show support for Roger, you know, sending someone over to do whatever we could do. Sometimes you couldn’t resolve it, but you’d put in the best effort you possibly can, which is important.”

Mechanical improvements were arriving daily via the Concorde, but the electronics remained a never-ending complication. By mid-April, it was clear the Zytec system was not up to the task of running five hundred miles.

Don Norton had been brought in early in the project to create the massive array of software commands for the engine, called mapping, just as he had done with the Ilmor D and the previous Ilmor engines. Like Hurley, he had once rushed to Reading because of electronics problems.

“I remember Don coming to the rescue in Reading,” said Kevin Walter. “We were going crazy trying to get it running cleanly on the dyno with the Zytec system. Don was a huge help, as we had no mapping capability at Penske.”

Any internal-combustion engine needs three things to operate: air, fuel, and spark. The air and fuel have to be fed into the cylinder at the right time and in the right amounts before being ignited by the spark plug. These functions are all commanded by the ECU.

Just as a roadmap tells a traveler where to go, mapping is the process of programming the engine how to work or react. The ECU utilizes an array of data streaming from a number of engine sensors, such as RPM, throttle angle, boost pressure, air and water temperatures, and fuel pressure. The ECU must interpret this data into the correct engine commands, controlling how much fuel to inject and when to fire the spark plugs from the moment the engine starts at an idle until it is at maximum RPMs.

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