{"id":3576,"date":"2014-03-05T09:00:38","date_gmt":"2014-03-05T17:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/?p=3576"},"modified":"2017-08-01T14:29:52","modified_gmt":"2017-08-01T21:29:52","slug":"jon-nelson-searches-for-speed-in-the-lucas-oil-off-road-racing-series","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/jon-nelson-searches-for-speed-in-the-lucas-oil-off-road-racing-series\/","title":{"rendered":"Jon Nelson Searches for Speed in the Lucas Oil Off Road Racing Series"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"
Greg Adler’s Off-Road vehicle goes seriously off road.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Photos: Courtesy Lucas Oil Off-Road Racing<\/p>\n

The world may be getting younger, but some of the old sayings still apply.<\/p>\n

Consider, for instance, the one in which the race driver asks \u201cHow fast can I go?\u201d and the response is \u201cHow much do you want to spend?\u201d That one\u2019s been around for a long, long time, but it may have more meaning now than ever.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s definitely the case in short course off road racing, where the cost of meeting the unceasing demand for more speed increases every day because it takes a lot more time and money to make a miniscule gain in performance.<\/p>\n

Veteran truck builder Jon Nelson calls it \u201cpicking up pennies.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nelson, the crew chief for 4 Wheel Parts owner Greg Adler in the Lucas Oil Off Road Racing Series, has been building vehicles for dirt and pavement racing since he went to work for legendary desert racer Walker Evans in the late 1970s. He worked with Evans, Parnelli Jones, Larry Minor and the late Frank \u201cScoop\u201d Vessels, ran Chevrolet\u2019s Class 8 desert program and fielded Chevrolet mini-trucks in the Mickey Thompson stadium series for Rick Johnson and Jimmie Johnson, built some rock crawling vehicles and launched the Spec Truck pavement series in 1996.<\/p>\n

The 55-year-old Hemet, California, resident said he was happily retired from racing and spending his time playing golf and managing the family property management business when Adler called and talked him into returning.<\/p>\n

What Nelson found was that in many ways the vehicles hadn\u2019t changed much in a decade or so, but in other ways there had been enormous improvement.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe drive train technology has improved and is still improving, offering better discs that have better traction on the 4-wheel drives,\u201d Nelson said. \u201cAnd underdrives. Nobody had an underdrive 15 years ago. Now everybody does so they can get optimum gearing. Guys are experimenting with manual shifting, taking the gearboxes out of them so they don\u2019t get that power loss and are getting more power to the ground.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe basic vehicles 10 or 15 years ago were pretty good and they\u2019ve improved a little bit, but the big advancement has been in the drive train.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"RacingJunkLucasOil\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Everyone who has driven a passenger car or truck is familiar with or has experienced the effects of overdrive, which lessens the strain on an engine by reducing the RPMs at highway speeds. An underdrive performs an opposite function, increasing the torque and horsepower output by reducing drag and inertia.<\/p>\n

The question is what\u2019s next, and when will we see it?<\/p>\n

\u201cAll the big steps are gone,\u201d Nelson said. \u201cThe dollars have been spent and we\u2019re down to the nickels now. But they\u2019ll keep coming up with better ways to do it \u2013 better, lighter, stronger.<\/p>\n

\u201cLet\u2019s say you raced dirt bikes 20 years ago. They\u2019d been building motorcycles for a long time at that point, so what\u2019s left to improve on? Wouldn\u2019t you like to be racing 20 years ago with one of today\u2019s bikes? They\u2019re amazing. They keep finding ways to make them better.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re picking up pennies. That\u2019s fun to look for, but it\u2019s very difficult in off road. On pavement you\u2019re looking for those little things and you\u2019ll see the results on the race track, so it\u2019s easier to quantify the results of those little things. In off road, the track changes minute by minute, so when you\u2019re trying to pick up a half a percent or a percent on a track that\u2019s moving 10 to 20 percent it\u2019s really hard to find.\u201d<\/p>\n

There may be more tools available to those searching for those incremental gains, but it still usually comes down to trial and error.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are some things that we can change really quick and go right back out and do an ABA test and try to validate it,\u201d Nelson said. \u201cBut you\u2019re trying to take the fly specks out of the pepper, man. It\u2019s tough.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou always have to come back to your baseline. Try your change, come back to the baseline; try your change, come back to the baseline. And just because it doesn\u2019t work one day doesn\u2019t mean it won\u2019t work the next day. You have to revisit those things all the time.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"February<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jon Nelson, the crew chief for 4 Wheel Parts owner Greg Adler in the Lucas Oil Off Road Racing Series, has been building vehicles for dirt and pavement racing since he went to work for legendary desert racer Walker Evans in the late 1970s.<\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":3841,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5470,27],"tags":[537,539,540,538,536,28,3708],"class_list":["post-3576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-off-road","category-off-road-racing","tag-2014-lucas-oil-off-road-racing","tag-4-wheel-parts","tag-greg-adler","tag-jon-nelson","tag-lucas-oil-off-road-racing-series","tag-off-road","tag-off-road-racing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/RacingJunkLucasOilFeature.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p42YSK-VG","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3576"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3576\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20882,"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3576\/revisions\/20882"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3841"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racingjunk.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}