Perfect Fairness: Navigating the NHRA with Vance & Hines

MotoGP is not the only motorcycle racing series beset by the new fashion for making “rules of the week.” As I learned on my recent trip to Vance & Hines, life with NHRA in dragracing can be at least as rough. I found V&H’s spacious shops in an industrial park in Brownsburg, Indiana, which is to US dragracing what Banbury, England, is to Formula 1—one after another big-name team and specialty supplier.

Here's the 2013 rules story as I heard it from Byron Hines: A number of years ago, Suzuki went to NHRA and said, "We'd like the Suzukis that teams are racing in your series to embody the modern technologies we use in our production bikes. Therefore, we'd like you to legalize four valves per cylinder in a billet four-cylinder package."

Up to that point, Suzuki Pro Stockers had two-valve-per-cylinder engines based on the GS1000. NHRA accepted this argument, so Vance & Hines asked to be able to use modern technology as seen on Harley-Davidson's V-Rod. V&H even asked to be considered to design and build the four-valve Suzuki, since the company is a longtime builder of many of the Suzuki engines and parts in the series. To Byron Hines, such a project would likely have to cost $500,000 to $750,000. Suzuki's choice eventually fell on the Don Schumacher dragracing organization.

“What happened was,” Hines said, “our engine got finished, but theirs never did.”

“Our four-valve was a real good engine,” said Matt Hines, Byron’s oldest son and three-time series champion. “Very reliable.”

And so it should be. According to “Duckworth’s Rule,” when you go from two valves to four, you can divide your problems by the square root of two (about 1.4). Reason? Because four smaller valves are so much lighter than two big ones, controlling their motion is much easier.

At one point during the 2012 season, V&H had a verbal agreement with NHRA that it could again run the four-valve engine in 2013, provided its displacement was cut by 10ci. This is the kind of fine adjustment NHRA likes to make, with the goal of keeping all the teams competitive. The main engines in the series are the V&H "Harley-Davidson," S&S-built "Buell" (neither of these purpose-designed 60-degree V-twin drag engines contains any H-D or Buell parts), and the Suzuki four. Other engines are certainly welcome, and veteran tuner Rob Muzzy has expressed the view that a modern four-valve Kawasaki ZX-14R could be made competitive, budget permitting.

How big are these engines? The V&H twin measures 4.9 x 4.24 inches for just under 160ci (2,620cc), while the much-higher-revving Suzuki gets 107ci (1,750cc). Further adjustments are made to machine weight as deemed necessary. Power is in the vicinity of 375 hp, and the 2013 V&H bike made a best run of 6.82 seconds at 197 mph.

Hines had just ordered shorter-stroke cranks in preparation for the 2013 season when NHRA let him know they’d decided the 10ci reduction wasn’t enough; V&H would have to go back to two valves.

“We came up with a really nice design,” Hines recalled, but then in late October, NHRA decided the new two-valve must have pushrods of some unstated minimum length. That length, 8 inches, was not revealed until November.

Designed in 2001, the original V&H two-valve drag engine had very short pushrods. New rules made going back to what they’d had history. Hines started work December 23, 2012, and was able to fire the new two-valve-per-cylinder, long-pushrod engine on February 23 of last year, leaving him less than four weeks to build it into a potentially winning motorcycle before the first national March 14–17 in Gainesville, Florida.

Results? V&H didn’t win the title, but team riders Andrew Hines and Eddie Krawiec won three nationals, including the last round in Pomona, California.

When I asked why such twitchy rules changes, Hines replied, “NHRA sees their central problem as containing Alan Johnson . They want to freeze enough technologies around Johnson to limit his advantage.” Hitting V&H with a complete redesign of its top end in two months was an extension of this thinking.

At the same time, you can read on the Internet a vast amount of opinion on what’s “fair” and “unfair.” Some think V&H should have to offer its engines for sale as S&S does. This reminds me of the grade-school teacher who says, “If you want to chew gum in class, you must bring enough for everyone.” Those who ask NHRA officials why this isn’t done are told, “The V&H engine was grandfathered in a long time ago” or, “I will not comment on that.”

Yet NHRA knows that if it leans too hard on V&H, the “goose” that builds so many of the Suzuki engines running in the class, the company could simply decide to concentrate 100 percent on its core business—exhaust systems.

Another point: Pro Stock Motorcycle stopped being a modified class a long time ago, a class of souped-up stockers with porting, high-compression pistons, and stiff clutch springs. The S&S and V&H big twins are 100-percent billet engines, with milled-from-solid crankcases, cylinders, and heads. The only remaining stock part on the Suzukis is the crankcases. NHRA knows it needs Harley fans in ticket lines, so it had to legalize purpose-built racing engines badged as Harleys. Their parts had to be capable of 350 hp, so that meant all-billet engines, and V&H and S&S bring them to the class. The only parts capable of reliability in Pro Stock now are parts made for the job. That means V&H does not modify engines; it creates them.

This current big twin revs to 10,000 rpm, and to do that with two valves requires 500 pounds of seat pressure, rising at full lift to between 1,200 and 1,400 pounds. Part of development was running a complete valve train on a Spintron, using non-contact position sensors to analyze valve motion.

“The noise!” Hines exclaimed. “And when the springs hit an active zone, the sound changed. And then, it went bang.” Engineering valve-train stability is difficult and expensive.

On the new two-valve engine, V&H decided it needed the accuracy of gear-driven cams, replacing the cogged belts of the original. Everything that flexes must be factored into designing cam contours. Otherwise, pushrod vibration, spring surge, or rocker flex will sink the ship. Valve operation with parts this big (intake valve diameter measures 2.6 inches!), run this hard, is a harsh, violent business in which one small weakness destroys everything. Every part, every detail, must be of the highest quality.

Fortunately there is enough dimensional overlap with the Pro Stock automobile class that its experienced suppliers can provide key parts of the necessary quality. In that class, one team owner lamented that he gets three runs per set of valve springs. Said team reputedly buys $25,000 worth of springs a month in season.

To level the playing field, sanctioning bodies force able teams like V&H to jump costlier hurdles than the rest. They must take care that this cost does not rise above the value of winning.