Wiring

The ACE shop floor looks more and more like a spaghetti factory gone ferral.  

There just can't be THAT many wires in one little racing car, it doesn't matter how many horsepower the darn thing has ... There's a whole bunch of electricity running around in a whole bunch of very tiny mil-spec* wires!

The "real" engine will be going into the Dragster today.  This is the racing engine, the one that's been in the chassis since SEMA was the "show" Duramax race engine (no crank, no pistons, nor rods) and it is going back onto a stand (and most likely back on display at the NHRA Wally Parks Motorsports Museum).  Of course any outside observer could have easily thought that this one was "real."  All engines that go into Banks project vehicles are always turned out in "show quality" colors and trim ... And the Dragster's engine is no exception, its just that the one that's going in later today is working version.

Of course there's a couple of good reasons for what adds up to just under a mile of tiny ty-wrapped wires on this machine: control and information.  About 25% of the wiring is basic engine control stuff.  The electrical nervous system that makes the machine work, the wiring loom so to speak.  The rest of the wires are connected to sensing devices that will observe and report all sorts of data including temperatures, pressures, wheel speed, engine RPM, fuel pressure and delivery amounts, chassis flex, gear position, even a GPS (on a vehicle that runs races only 1,320 feet long!).

Some old-time racing mechanics still call engines "lumps."  In their day engines were made to be heard, and not seen.  For the most part they were faces that only a mechanic could love in the first place.  Not so here.  In actuality this is the first Banks vehicle in over 20 years to feature even a partially-exposed engine.
 
In this machine the engine and the driver will both be pretty darn easy to spot.
 
At Las Vegas two years ago when the S-10 made some of it first public runs, the crew was quite quick to take the engine cover off after every run for two good reasons.  The first was routine racecar between-the-rounds maintenance.  The other was so that the large group of fans who watched the spectacular runs (and who trailed the machine back to the pit area after each pass) would be able to see that the engine was, indeed, a full-blooded Banks Duramax diesel engine!

 *the mil-spec (military specification) wires that Banks uses to electrify the Sidewinder Dragster appear very tiny indeed.  But only on the outside. These wires are still called out in standard gauge sizes (for the metal part of the wire that carries the electricity) but the outer casing is less than half of the thickness of regular electrical wire and about ten times as tough.  This almost wispy appearing wire was designed and manufactured to stand up to whatever the military can throw at it.  The next closest thing to actual combat use is the kind of no-holds-barred competition that motorsports competition provides, and that's one of the reasons that Banks is there.