Antique & Classic Cars Blog

And don’t worry how they work.

I was editing a performance tuning book this week, which contained an interesting fact about piston speed in a running engine. Even among professional race mills, the upper limit for pistons within the cylinder is only about 5500 feet per minute, or a nudge over 60 miles per hour.

For a piece attached to a crankshaft churning thousands of revolutions a minute, that seemed pretty pokey. Yet it’s average speed and since a piston travels linearly back and forth it must come to a full stop twice each revolution. The author said he explained this to a current NASCAR star, to remain nameless, and the driver replied, “If you believe that, you’re f%#$ crazy!”

As a friend observed, “some people belong in the car, some people belong in the shop.”

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 13th, 2007 at 1:49 pm and is filed under Car stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.