I get a kick out of people talking about Jenkins using stuffing blocks. Yes, that was a pretty common trick, but I can tell you that Bill was not stuffing plenums the way most people think he was stuffing plenums. He was sly, like a fox. He made an intake for the stuff we used, and everyone that saw it would scoff, and remark that it was all wrong. As the car would go out and re-set both ends of the record on nearly every pass.
One of our specialties was making your eyes see what we wanted you to see, rather than what was really there. We had to run a guy at a points meet, who was very fast, and was also pitted right next to us. We got back from the scales and he was thrashing on his car, with the body off, unbolting weight from all over the car. We did our normal thing, cooling the motor and the clutch, and by that time, we were under some pretty intense scrutiny. I asked Brian to raise the front of the trailer, and we rolled the car inside. I walked back out, and shut the back door, amid all kinds of questions as to whether or not we were broke. I walked around, went in the side door of the trailer, shut that door, walked over and sat down on a fenderwell. Brian asked what I had planned, and I told him to sit down, that I didn't have a thing planned. We chatted for about 20 minutes, then rolled the car back outside. Whilst the car was in the trailer, we touched nothing. When we got to the starting line, the other guy red-lit. All I did was get in his head, without him even knowing I was doing it.
We had a couple of tricks on the car, that were right out in the open. On a door car, they would have been hidden, but we didn't have that luxury. So, we got two, ginormous, white beach towels. One got wrapped around the intake, any time the car was not running. I had to pull the cowl off the car, to get to the onboard computer, so when the cowl came off, I would immediately drop the other towel over the top frame rail, so it covered the clutch pedal and pedal pivot. That kept everyone's eyes busy, and no one ever saw what we were really doing. They were too busy worrying about what we were hiding under those towels.
We had one, real early V-6 that ran really fast at the Edgewater points meet. We had the intake runners covered with pieces of a Pepsi case and duct tape. We had hurt something or another, and we ended up going to Indy with the same motor, but it was a lame duck. We had the motor apart, right before Indy, and when we bolted it back together, I cut up a Miller Lite case, and taped it on. We're at Indy, and the pig wouldn't fall out of a tree. A guy from Southern Indiana walked by, and saw us all doom and gloom, because we had failed to qualify. He told me we should have been running the motor with the Pepsi intake cover, because that one was a lot faster. <LOL> It was the same motor, but he remembered nothing other than that Pepsi case.
We had one combination that wanted a single Dominator. We had a two-4 bbl. top that simply would not go down the track. It looked OK on the dyno, but we don't race dynos, aye? The two intake tops were as different as night and day. We put the single carb combination back on it, and the car picked right up, and flew. Two races later, a guy, who is a rather well-respected Comp crewchief, told me we should look at going back to the single 4 bbl. People get so focused on trying to see something that is not there, there entirely miss what is right in front of them.
Running an odd-fire V-6, we had to use a cam trigger, rather than a crank trigger. We had made up a trigger wheel, and had located the magnets a few degrees out from where they needed to be. So, we pressed the magnets out, re-machined the wheel and pressed the magnets into the correct holes. As a joke, we used a marker to draw arrows to two different hole locations. On one arrow, we wrote, "Good Air," and on the other arrow, we wrote, "Bad Air". A couple of guys saw that, in the staging lanes, down in Atlanta, and were whispering back and forth, that we would move magnets for different air conditions.
One of them hollered at Brian and asked if we were in good air, or bad air. He shrugged, and told them to ask me. When they did, I asked them where the magnets were installed. We had them so bamboozled, they were speechless. And it was nothing more than Off Brothers Engineering.
And no, I'll not tell you what Bill was doing with intakes. But just keep one thought in mind - things are not always as they appear. With the new rules, the Pro Stock guys are disguising everything they can, in the hope of misdirecting people.
As for making a tunnel ram more street-friendly, there is a whole list of things that can be done to put a Band-Aid on the combination. But getting it right requires ticking nearly everything off the list. And because of different cams, and different gear ratios, what works on one motor might not work for another. It's not just the intake, it is the entire package.
