On Tue, Sep 19, 2006 at 12:00:42PM -0700, Brendan MacRae wrote: > > --- John Francis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > As a matter of fact, those aren't fumes - it's > > clear-air turbulence caused by the heat rising > > from the engines. > > > > Ahh, gotcha. Like heat rising from asphalt on a hot > day. I was thrown by the guy refuling the car.
It's an extremely common mistake. But the last thing you want around a hot engine (and I mean really hot - there's a wonderful photograph of a Cosworth F1 engine on a test stand, with the exhaust pipes glowing orange) is fuel, or fuel vapour. That's particularly true of Champ Cars, which are fuelled with Methanol - it burns with a totally invisible flame (except at night time, when you can see a bit of a blue tinge to the flame). Gasoline fires are bad, but at least you can see them. So the fuel nozzles not only deliver fuel, they also exhaust the air displaced by the fuel - nothing gets out into the vicinity of the car. As a final precaution the teams also spray a splash of water onto the car at the end of refuelling, just in case a drop or two of fuel drips out of the end of the nozzle when it is removed from the refuelling port - methanol is miscible with water, so you can extinguish methanol fires using nothing more sophisticated than a bucket of water. You can see the water spray here: http://panix.com/~johnf/temp/GoGoGo.jpg That's Alex Zanardi leaving the pits after his final pit stop (in 1997, the first year he won the championship). Note that the rear wheels are spinning, but the front wheels are still stationary. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
