Over the next several weeks I will try and recap what went down at the Camshaft Innovations seminar that was held March 26th at Team Z Motorsports. Team Z’s shop just happens to be about 500 yards away from the plant where they are cranking out the 2005 Mustang just as fast as they can make them.

There were six speakers for the day, starting at 9AM and wrapping up just after 5:30 in the afternoon. Mike Curcio and Joe Shober from MCRP, Cary Chouinard from ET Performance, John Fenton from Canfield Cylinder Heads, Jay Allen of Camshaft Innovations, Mark McKeown of McKeown Motorsports Engineering and Dave Zimmerman of Team Z Motorsports. Because of all the information discussed, each presenter will have their own write up, to do otherwise would not serve these people who came out justice. Hopefully, it will also serve as incentive for you to attend next year.

For the fifty people in attendance, who each paid $100 to be there, I would be surprised if everyone didn’t emerge with at least $10,000 worth of new information and knowledge. The volume and level of the knowledge and information that was presented was stunning. There were people from Nova Scotia to St. Louis in attendance. There were some top name racers who made the trip, along with plenty of “the little guys”.

Several overriding themes presented themselves throughout the seminar. Number one, spending a few more dollars up front will save you thousands of dollars at the end of the day. Put another way, it’s better to take an extra month or two and a few hundred extra dollars putting a motor together the right way, the first time, and be happy, then to slam something together and deal with disappointment that will follow when the combination doesn’t perform as you expected, or fails outright.

The second theme that I pulled out of the day was something you know in your gut to be true but sometimes try hard to deny, and that is you get what you pay for. Yes everyone has a limited budget, yes everyone wants to pay as little as possible for parts and services, but, you need to be careful of the lowest cost supplier. There are often reasons they are cheep. Maybe they use valve springs that cost $8 for the whole set, maybe its inferior materials in rocker arms, the list goes on.

When it comes to “the cutting/bleeding edge” of technology and engine development Hot Street seems to be where the technology is. With a couple of exceptions, due to rules limitations, the old NHRA Pro Stock Truck motor development is alive and well here. When I asked Mark McKeown if he were still building a PS Truck motor today, would he be over 1000HP, he said, “absolutely!” That, my friend, is three horsepower per cubic inch! In my mind, that is astounding and a concept that’s almost hard to grasp.

The last theme that I took away is that dynos and flow benches are tools. The numbers that emerge from them did not come down from Mount Sinai engraved in stone as the “be all end all” gospel. In many ways the numbers don’t mean ANYTHING! A dyno and a flow bench are merely tools, no different than a torque wrench. At the end of the day, how much does your car weigh, what was the mile an hour you ran in the quarter mile, pull out your Moroso slide rule, line the two figures up and that is your effective horsepower. Period, end of story. If you run 116 mph in the quarter and cross the scales at 3350 lbs you have 408 effective horsepower. Almost everyone’s flow bench and dyno will output different numbers, and there are people out in the marketplace who aren’t above “calibrating” their equipment to put out inflated numbers to make their own work look better. At the end of the day you are not racing a dyno or a flow bench, you are racing the track and the clocks, and they are the ultimate judge, jury and executioner.

Throughout these series of six columns to come, I will try to break down as best I can what the different speakers discussed. There are some topics that will be difficult to convey, even being there in person topics needed to be explained two and three times to sink in. In other cases there were visuals used that I will try and relate in words to the best of my abilities. In other words, YOU SHOULD HAVE BEEN THERE!

As for some background on myself, I have been involved with the Mustang scene since 1990 when I began helping out Rich Roback with his crate motor cars. Over the years I have been a driver, been one of the main people involved in the old AMRA, and announced quite a number of heads up races including the first WFC race, many of the J&P days in Canada, NMRA’s first foray to Phoenix and a couple Fun Ford races at Milan and Norwalk.