Talk:Novi engine

Some references I found
Here is every mention of "Lou Welch" and "Novi" I could scrape up on Newspapers.com. Note that lots of these are probably not relevant, but here they are formatted as citations: jp×g 22:19, 20 September 2021 (UTC)


 * A vast amount of utterly pointless effort, why? Incidently, Lew Welch's name isn't spelt "Lou".  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:589:300:CA70:65ED:5265:FAE:E264 (talk) 23:35, 16 June 2022 (UTC)

various thoughts on the Novi
Here is some background on the Novi, which someone might work into the article:

Lew Welch ran his operation on a shoe-string, and since he was only interested in the 500, every June the cars would be put in storage until the following May. Consequently there was no development or debugging during the year, and every May was a panic to resolve various issues before qualifying.

Another side effect of Welch's low budget was that the team never had any engine spares on hand. If something broke, a replacement had to be ordered from Offenhauser in California (Offenhauser never had a shop in Michigan, don't know how that falsehood crept into the article), and shipped express to Indianapolis, while the team sat idly by.

The article notes that Welch stayed with the Kurtis front-drive chassis long after other teams had changed to rear-drive. This was a large part of why the Novi cars weren't competitive; while a front-drive chassis was the way to go on bricks, as the Speedway steadily gained asphalt the front-drive cars became increasingly hard to drive. (Unlike a front-wheel-drive car, which has a differential and CV joints, a front-drive car had a spool and rigid axle, meaning both front wheels always turned the same speed. A great thing on the straights, especially when they were brick, but it required the inside tire to slip in the corners - no big deal on the bricks, but a huge handling problem on asphalt).

When Welch bought a rear-drive chassis, the engine had to be turned around 180 degrees so the drive shaft went to the back. As originally designed, the carb sat right by the firewall, with a very short throttle linkage. Turned around, a long linkage with several bell-cranks was needed to reach the carb mounted at the very front of the car. It took a couple of years to get that to work right, altho thankfully it was more prone to fail by not opening the throttle fully rather than sticking wide open.

Another problem with the new chassis was the engine was mounted too far forward. In the front-drive, weight on the front wheels was good. In the rear-drive chassis, too much front weight hurt traction on the drive wheels, while wearing out the front tires. This again likely would have been solved if the cars weren't on blocks for 10 months of the year.

The one big thing Andy Granatelli did, after buying the Novi's, was to buy some track time and do testing. After a year or so, he had a decently reliable race engine and car. Unfortunately by then the Novi's time was past, with the arrival of the Foyt-Ford (so called to distinquish it from the Cosworth-Ford of later years) and the turbo Offy being the future. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:589:300:CA70:65ED:5265:FAE:E264 (talk) 00:06, 17 June 2022 (UTC)