It’s A Brave New World For ASA

Editor’s Note: Joe Balash is the technical director for the American Speed Association, which runs 20 races per year from Florida to California and all over the Midwest. In 2000, the ASA series shifted from a V-6-based open engine formula to a spec engine formula featuring General Motors’ Vortec 5700 V-8. Circle Track sat down with the man in charge of making sure the playing field is level for all comers to the venerable stock car series, asking about how different his life is in light of a spec-engine formula and where the sport is headed in terms of technology.

Circle Track: You have a series where the engine is spec and the tires are spec. What areas do the drivers and teams now focus on to gain an advantage?

JOE BALASH: There’s a tremendous amount of suspension, chassis and geometry work that they’re doing. We also have specifications for the front and rear clips, but we give the teams some room to work there. A lot of it is all in the setup of the car, so those are the main areas. They also do some work in the airbox area, because we allow the teams anything behind the front screen to the top air filter. Not the air filter itself, but the airbox, they can do anything they want in there as far as flow goes. We spec the upper and lower airbox, and we also spec the tube that goes into the engine.

CT: In taking away traditional tuning tools on the engine, has that made it a level playing field?

BALASH: Yes. It’s made it more competitive. I think you always have the issues where teams with more money to do research and development and a little more testing kind of separate themselves, but we do things to try to level the playing field for that. We really want to make it as even and level as possible.

CT: ASA has been in the forefront of what is one possible future for motorsports both at the national level and below, with the spec engine and spec tire. Do you see this happening?

BALASH: Absolutely. We would like to be associated with that, not only with the ASA series but also with the work we’re doing with the ASA member tracks. We are developing relationships with short tracks across the country, working with them on their point funds, and we would like to talk to them about their engine programs and those types of things in the future.

CT: As a logical extension of that, GM is behind its short track crate engine, and Ford and Dodge have them too. Do you see that as a positive step for motorsports?

BALASH: I do. I really see the positives of cost containment in engine programs. When you talk to all the teams and look at the short-track level, it seems that the major expenditure is on the engine. In some parts of the country, some amazing amounts of money are being spent to run Saturday-night shows.

CT: For $2,000 to win, in some Late Model cases?

BALASH: Exactly right. You’ll never be able to recoup the investment in your engine. What they are doing is, some person in the area who can buy 50 more horsepower puts it into the car and he gets that advantage. Sometimes that might not be good for the show and for the fans to see one car run away with everything. They want to see close, competitive racing.

CT: Since you have a spec engine, are there any aftermarket parts in the engine?

BALASH: At this point, there aren’t really any aftermarket parts in the engine. It’s all basically GM parts. We made some modifications to the engine itself to beef up the valvesprings. We have a specially ground ASA camshaft inside the engine, and we also went to high-flow electronic fuel injectors. We do run a Moroso dry-sump oil system, so there is a Moroso oil pan and a Razor scavenge pump.

CT: And you have a spec fuel cell?

BALASH: We have both ATL and Fuel Safe for our fuel cells, and they both have two electronic fuel pumps similar to what is run in passenger cars; we just have redundant systems. In a carbureted car, you would have a redundant ignition system, so we have redundant fuel pumps.

CT: Have there been many attempts to circumvent the PCM (engine control module)?

BALASH: Well, these are racers ... We have to be on our toes to look at every part of the car. We have to make sure that there aren’t things happening to try to circumvent the electronics and the fuel system. We do fuel-pressure checks to make sure they’re not trying to pump it up. We run a high-pressure system and it’s already at 58 psi. We disconnect the crankshaft sensor and hook to a fuel injector and we can test the PCM to make sure the rev limiter shuts off at the proper place (6,500 rpm). We check the resistance in the wires to make sure people aren’t putting resistors in there to try to trick the computers.

One thing that has happened as far as computer systems go, in working with a number of different people, we’ve maximized the computer system that’s in the engine. If someone could get around that system, then they’re going to fall off the other end. If someone tried to force the fuel system to a higher fuel pressure, then the car goes super-rich and it takes the power out of the engine. There’s a lot of development work that went along with this; many years of testing before the car actually hit the racetrack to maximize these systems. Will people try? Yeah, they’ll try to do whatever they can to gain an advantage. We’re there to look at all the components and make sure they’re not doing that.

CT: In having to stay ahead of the racers, has that made your job harder or easier?

BALASH: We still have to check so many things on the car. I’m comfortable with the seal package on the engine, but we still have to look at it. We still have to make sure that things aren’t happening. We’ll take some engines apart here, some random checks. Normally, we take the top three cars plus two at random from qualifying and the top three plus two at random for post-race. We do a blind draw on who the randoms are before the event starts so no one feels like they’re being picked on. The blind draw is done when they get their PCMs.

CT: When USAC used to run pop-off valves for turbocharger boost pressure, the feeling was that some pop-offs were something more than equal. Have you found that to be the case with the PCM units, and have people tried to help them be more equal?

BALASH: We haven’t found any trouble with the PCMs themselves, but we have found people trying to put oxygenated substances in the snorkel tube coming into the engine. We have had some teams try to run data recorders because you have all that live data coming off the cars, and we’ve had to remove them from the car. As a series, we would put data recorders in the car, and we did that last year. We had a rookie who had a phenomenal year, and one of the things we did was put a recorder in the car to make sure nothing was happening with the rev limiter or the computer system.

CT: The way you apply tech inspection is no different than when you ran carburetors, only it’s done with computers now. Some organizations really don’t like computers. Have you found it to be more difficult with the computers in the equation?

BALASH: I haven’t, but that’s my background and among the reasons why I’m here. I spent almost nine years writing programs on electronic engine controls and teaching fuel injection computer controls to automotive technicians for a company called Allen Test Products. I spent another eight years as a project manager for Mac Tools managing electronics. Through my relationship with racing through Mac Tools, that’s how I built my relationship with ASA and how I came to be the technical director. I’m just starting my third season with ASA and second as technical director.

CT: When ASA went to this spec engine program, there was a considerable body of thought that said it would put engine builders out of business. Do you see this formula—spec engines, crate engines, electronics—as the wave of the future, and will there be room for the independent engine builder that is in place now?

BALASH: Absolutely. We also have relationships with engine builders as part of our series. We use an engine builder who dyno tested and sealed all our engines for us (John Lingenfelter). Our technical support we contract through Katech. So we still have those relationships with engine builders, who also now do a tremendous amount of work on fuel-injected engines for other racing series. When we looked at it, and we look at the future of racing, the so-called “stock car,” you’d be hard-pressed to find a car that wasn’t fuel injected. That is what the automotive technicians and people who work on today’s cars are working on. You’d be hard-pressed to find a high-school vocational tech student who can’t work on fuel injection. You put a carburetor in front of them, a Quadrajet off an older car, they wouldn’t know what to do with it.

CT: When the announcement was made that ASA was going to a spec GM engine, there was grumbling that it would drive the Ford fans away and that no one would pay to see an all-GM series. Has that been the case in your opinion?

BALASH: You know, I think the fans are looking for competitive racing. There is some allegiance to the brand and body style, certainly, but I think they are looking for hot drivers they can relate to. I think that’s what’s important, the close racing. If Gary St. Amant moved from Chevrolet to Pontiac, his fans are still going to be loyal to him. The drivers are good, exciting drivers put on fantastic shows, and I think the fans are looking for that competitive, wheel-to-wheel racing where Gary St. Amant, Kevin Cywinski and Mike Garvey are running side-by-side. I’m a technology fan and I love Formula One racing. I was happy to be in Indianapolis for the first Formula One race in the U.S. in some time. I saw both passes. It’s just not what short-track people are looking for. They’re looking for the excitement, and that’s what ASA racing provides.

CT: Is this more of a driver’s series than it used to be?

BALASH: I think drivers can showcase their talent more. Johnny Sauter is a perfect example. He’s a tremendous talent. People said he was doing all sorts of things to gain advantages on his car. He moves up to the Busch Series and what does he do? He finishes third in his first race. That’s what we’re proud of in ASA, the drivers who come out of it. Now that we have evenly matched engines, we showcase driving talent. That’s not to take anything away from the crew chiefs and the setup on the cars, because that’s equally important. There are some people out there who couldn’t find a setup with a pair of binoculars, but there are some very talented crew chiefs out there. When we say that some of our drivers are going that direction, you can almost triple that number in terms of crew chiefs, mechanics and technicians who have gone on and been incredibly successful behind pit wall.