Racecars are violent machines, but they need plenty of soft adjustments to maximize the force they can use to abuse the surface of a racetrack. If you want to make the right changes to optimize what your car can do you need plenty of data to make that happen.

The first step in understanding torque converter data is knowing what engine load sensitivity is, according to Marty Chance from Neal Chance Racing Converters, as he sat down to explain why you need to look at torque converter data to get the most out of your engine. Each engine has a different load sensitivity, and it’s how fast you can actually load the engine so it accelerates the car at the fastest rate possible. Knowing the load your engine likes and where is going to make tuning your converter through data analysis possible. A data-log will show you a world of information in determining load sensitivity.

Marty pores over data logs as part of the services offered by Neal Chance Racing Converters, and he shared with us the many issues you can catch by doing a torque converter data analysis.

“You can see on a data log if you’re blowing through a converter with excessive slippage. That means you made a bunch of power but it never made it to the tires. Now, if the converter is too tight and you don’t have enough slippage, you’re laboring the engine too much and haven’t allowed it to get to its optimal power range fast enough. There’s a balance between locking it up to fast, and not fast enough. If you don’t lock it up quick enough, you just blow through the converter, lock it up to fast and you’re going to drag the engine down.”

So, that means that if you’ve got excessive slippage you’re going to leave e.t. and speed on the table when you look at your time-slip. Part of what Chance does with customers when looking at their converter data is to help them understand how to tune a torque converter to use what the track can hold, along with other factors.

“We look to see if the converter is too tight and the traction control is coming on and killing power. If there’s excessive slippage, it might be from a dump valve that’s being over-dumped and not keeping the converter charged. We can also examine the data to see where there are issues other than the converter. We’re not suspension experts, but we will see in the data where the problem is in the shocks, or how something is set up. That means we help customers find gains in areas other than the converter, and then we can find ways to make the converter better,” Chance explains.

To illustrate the point of how important looking at data is, Chance provided this graph that shows two different runs by the same car with a converter that’s on the tight side and one that’s on the loose side. In this graph, the pink lines are engine RPM and driveshaft RPM for a converter that’s too tight. The yellow lines show the same for a converter that’s too loose.

You’ll notice that around 1.1-seconds into the run the engine RPM (pink) shows the loading of the engine from a tight converter. The engine is pulled down almost 100 rpm and the engine drops 1,700 rpm on the shift. The yellow engine RPM only drops 600 RPM, but the driveshaft RPM is much lower for the run in yellow. What did the time-slips say between the two? The pink line pass was a 4.36 while the yellow pass was a 4.90, so as you can see a loose converter will diminish e.t. and speed.

If you want to learn more about the torque converter data analysis service offered by Neal Chance Racing Converters make sure to visit the company’s website right here.