Gearing up for the INEX Winter Heat Series

We are currently gearing up to run the INEX Winter Heat Series in Charlotte, NC in November. I know that seems a long way off from now, but it's the best we can do w/o sponsors. In the past, i've driven for UNCC, and most of the people out there know me from the #49 green/gold coupe. I made a name for myself out there, especially at the road course, going through tech in every race we entered, sometimes with a random pull because i'd passed so many cars.... Those were the days, the fights, the bumpers.... They were going to throw away my old body the other day and it made me sit down and think about all the fun we had out there.....

We had two cars, and two separate teams. I was the driver for the 49 car as you can see here with Matt Tomlin as the crew chief. Arthur Carver IV drove the 46 car with Jason Harwood as the crew cheif. Matt and I brought home heat wins, and every trophy except the elusive 1st place trophy.

We were tough once we got in the lead, i'd usually jump the start and check out for the rest of the race, especially in the rain. We were unstoppable in the rain, and the best part was that we were on 4yr old tires, and only had rain tires on the rear, because we shared one set between the two cars...
This was the day we almost beat Jake Crum.... I lead all the laps in the first heat race and won, and in the second heat came from the back because of the invert and finshed top 5. I started on the pole for the feature and Crum jumped the start, led the whole race, and won. I finished 2nd that day to Crum, after starting on the pole. This was the second road race i'd ever run in my life!

Believe it or not, the school actually let us do some testing in one of the student lots. We quickly ruined the lot with doughnuts, as you can see me illustrating here, and eventually the police came and ran us off of the basketball court that we took over as our setup area.

This day was one of my most famous of all driving for the school.... This was the scene after the last lap of the first heat race with the whole field getting wrecked because of some idiot going into turn 1 on the last lap...(I was leading when this happened, and we all got taken out) This was the scene after the whole team was at the fence yelling at me not to go punch the guy in the face.... This is where the legendary "Dan" came into the picture, bending the front clip back on the car. Matt deserves credit as well, he worked his butt off with me to get the thing back together for the next heat race....
I wrecked the 4th place car in the B-main to get the last transfer spot on the last lap... and that started me 20th in the feature (shotgun on the field)....

I came through the field fast and was able to pass 12 cars in 8laps, and eventually knocked the front bumper off of the car on a restart, and got black flagged and taken out of the race....it's a shame.....

Due to the financial issues that the country is currently in, Phipps Engineering has decided to focus it's efforts on the Winter Heat season in 2008. In the mean time, much reserach is being conducted on our legends cars on part failure analysis. Other planned summer reserach includes aerodynamic fender research and risk/reward with lightening suspension components.

Past Year's news.....The sedan was brought out of retirement last year with the addition of a new front clip and numerous chassis updates.

The sedan made an appearance at Langley speedway for testing and was run at South Boston Speedway a week later. The car was strong but was had engine problems all day long to produce a mid pack finish after tangling with another car on the backstretch.

We are proud to announce the addition of Jody Archer to the Phipps Engineering team from Edmonton, AB Canada. Jody picked up 3 tenths on the competition with our setup in the car and with a little tuning should be able to pick up a little more on everyone up there.

Recent analysis has been conducted with the lightening of suspension spacers for weight savings. It has been observed on several other cars that aluminum spacers have been used in place of the stock steel spacers. We took this to the next level with several types of aluminum and analysis with another disclosed material. A spacer compression analysis was set up in solidworks to determine how much the spacer would compress under the bolt torque load.

This is just a screenshot of one of the compression tests. All in all, the weight savings of doing this is minimal, and you run the risk with aluminum of the spacer crushing enough to allow bolts w/o locknuts to loosen up during the race.....