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Naturally Aspirated
Posts: 471
Joined: Fri May 22, 2015 3:17 pm
Location: Blue Anchor, NJ / Richmond, VA
Cars: 2013 Ford Mustang GT California Special
2010 Ford F-150 XLT
Naturally Aspirated
Posts: 600
Joined: Wed Nov 05, 2014 8:00 pm
Location: Christchurch, New Zealand
Cars: 2000 Toyota Altezza Auto
KLinardo wrote:I'll volunteer for a mid season interview about the 3 Boss Motorsports AMWEC cars.
Naturally Aspirated
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Mister Strop wrote:Our methods are tried and tested so we were able to fix those on a very limited closed testing schedule.
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Vri: Is Boss Motorsports preforming better than expected?
KL: That's a difficult question to answer. This is really the first big racing endeavor we entered into with our cars. We obviously set out with all intentions to try to win, but we knew we were pretty new to the racing world and we knew there would be a learning curve.
I would say we are right around where we expected with the Boss 499 AGTE car. It was originally designed for a racing series that never got off the ground. We put so much time into it, and it was supposed to be our flagship, so we decided we needed to get it into another event. Re-purposing the race trim from one series and its rules to AMWEC AGTE class proved to be a challenge and I think you see that in what I would consider sub par runs. Though, it surprises us sometimes.
Our Boss-Kart AP2 car is definitely not performing as well as we expected. We don't really use turbos outside of heavy duty or extreme one-off builds, but we tried a twin-turbo V6 as an experiment in AP2 and it did not work out. This was one area where I was testing the waters for future AP1 builds depending on technological development and rule modifications we would see moving on into 2016 and beyond. Our drivers have given me plenty of feedback (Read: an earful of complaints) about the difficulty of putting the power down and how easy it is to shred the soft compound tires. Those tires were also a test/experiment to see how they performed on the various circuits this year. You can probably expect us to continue to utilize and tune for medium compound tires on future builds, so long as tire compounds aren't drastically different in 2016.
The AP1 car has actually been a pleasant surprise. IL CAPO literally means "The Boss" in Italian (capitalization for emphasis). So we were taking a gamble with this car from Boss Motorsports. If it hung around the back of the field, we would have cursed ourselves from being able to use the IL CAPO nameplate, and that wouldn't have looked good from a company called Boss Motorsports and a President with Linardo as a last name. Regardless, I think this car has great amounts of potential. It's actually powered by a Ford SVT 5.4L V8 that we took and refined to broaden the torque curve and get the HP numbers where we needed to be compliant with the power : weight rules. It's been a great car and a great engine. It's very stable, easy to drive, and really can challenge the other AP1 competitors. I'm very pleased with it and looking forward to adjusting our tunes here and there for next season. I think there's quite a bit of speed to be found in our cars.
Vri: With entries in all three classes, Which, at the start of the season, were you expecting to do the best?
KL: Well I may have partially answered this question, but I really wasn't sure. The AP2 car was going to be boom or bust. It was either going to be our best or worst design and it chose to be the latter.
I thought the AGTE car would do the best within its class because I thought we had built a really balanced FR car that had plenty of life under the hood. I also thought we had a leg up because this car was in development well before the rules to this challenge were announced, so I thought we would have an engineering edge. Not to mention, I didn't know or realize how many good production vehicles would show up for this.
Also, like I said earlier, we were taking a gamble on the AP1 entry because it's really our first attempt at a MR vehicle, so I didn't think it would do so well.
Vri: Follow up question, which vehicle were you expecting to do the worst?
KL: See my last two answers. It was a toss up between AP1 and AP2 in the beginning.
Vri: Do the cars meet the expectations of the R&D teams?
KL: Yes and no. The AP1 car really exceeded expectations and we are very happy to have a solid foundation to work on moving forward. The AGTE car was a disappointment simply due to the time that has been spent on its original design, its production version, and now the AMWEC rebuild. I mean, we have a knack for fiddling with the Ford Coyote 5.0 V8 you'll find under the hood, but the chassis team seems to have built a GT500-esque Boss 499 instead of a GT350R-esque Boss 499. You can put it around a track and really make use of its relatively high power, but you lose too much time in the corners which causes us to struggle overall. That really put a damper on the R&D folks.
The AP2 car was a little bit of a test mule. It was the Boss-Kart that ran in another race series and slowly came into its own as that event wore on. After some outside consultation, we trashed the original experimental engine and rebuilt it with a turbo-inline 4 for testing and then again for the AMWEC with the twin-turbo V6. We thought the two turbos and more compact length would help. We also wanted to see how soft tires performed and we learned from that too. That car couldn't disappoint us no matter what it did on the track. The R&D team really enjoys taking that car apart at the end of a race and analyzing the performance of the different components. Even with the superior results of IL CAPO, the Boss-Kart will probably give us the most useful data in making future design choices. This year, we are just happy that it isn't finishing last in the class or overall.
Vri: Finally, will your team be returning for the 2016 AMWEC Season?
KL: You bet. Even with the mixed bag of results thus far, Boss Motorsports is definitely in this for the long haul and looks to make gains on the valuable information we learned this year. I'm not sure if you'll see a three pronged attack like this year, though. We are not doing that well in the Manufacturer's Title and we're running 3 cars while other teams are doing well by focusing on one vehicle. I have yet to decide how we will go about managing our resources since we are such a small shop. You can probably count the Boss 499 out of AGTE contention next year if the rules don't change. It's just not a comparable design to those like that of the Zeus, and since that's our competition, we need to reconsider our FR American Muscle approach. The IL CAPO will definitely be back, but probably with a new power plant. It may even show up in a different class. We can't speculate too much until the 2016 rules package is made official. Rumor has it that we might see a displacement change next year and we plan to make use of any new allowances. That goes for all of our entries, but we can't show all of our cards.
Naturally Aspirated
Posts: 600
Joined: Wed Nov 05, 2014 8:00 pm
Location: Christchurch, New Zealand
Cars: 2000 Toyota Altezza Auto
Naturally Aspirated
Posts: 600
Joined: Wed Nov 05, 2014 8:00 pm
Location: Christchurch, New Zealand
Cars: 2000 Toyota Altezza Auto
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Naturally Aspirated
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