First of all, I'd like to apologize for waiting almost a month to blog. If you didn't know, my wife and I adopted a newborn baby in late January. I'm finally back in the swing of things and gearing up for the racing season to begin!

Today, I'd like to talk about rear wheel speed. All of the tune up adjustments for the launch of the car are in an attempt to get a certain rear wheel speed. If there is too much wheel speed, the car will smoke the tires and not enough will cause tire shake. Both results end up in aborted runs.

There are several variables that can be changed to affect wheel speed. Those adjustments also depend on track conditions. If a track is hot and greasy, we need to be careful to not get too much wheel speed. In these conditions we will run used tires because they are bigger in diameter. When track conditions are the opposite, we will run new tires to get more rear wheel speed because they are smaller in diameter. Some teams will make rear wheel changes in the staging lanes if weather conditions are changing quickly.

Other adjustments we will make to affect wheel speed is primary weight on the clutch, height of the wheelie bar, and air pressure in the tires.

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