After More Than 40 Years Of Operation, Los Angeles County Raceway closed its gates for the final time last summer. Practically every quarter-mile time printed in these pages-from the inception of the magazine in 1993 until the Jan. '08 issue-came from LACR, as did the numbers in many other motorcycle and car magazines based in southern California. We'd known for a while that the end was near: the dragstrip was smack in the middle of a gravel pit, and over the past several years the excavations had been getting closer and closer to the strip itself. Early last year all that was left was a strip of pavement surrounded by deep pits and heavy equipment. i'd like to say we were prepared months in advance with an alternate venue, but the closure had been threatened for years and we thought there were plenty of other dragstrips around to visit. Of course when it came time to actually book some time at a different strip, the reality set in that we'd had it easy all those years at LACR. Exclusive dragstrip time-if you can get it-is outrageously expensive at the remaining local spots. so beginning with our last issue we began gathering all our acceleration data at Honda's Proving Center of California-the company's testing grounds deep in the mojave desert where we've done top-speed testing for a number of years-using our stalker radar gun.
While HPCC features a road course, supercross and motocross tracks and other types of test facilities, important to us is the 7.5-mile oval. On a straight section of the oval we set up the radar gun and record acceleration data on a laptop; stalker's Acceleration testing system computes NHRA-equivalent numbers for quarter-mile time and speed from that data. Yes, i know it's not a real dragstrip with timing lights, but for more than two years every time we visited LACR we had the stalker present and compared its data with the timing slips. And on almost every one of hundreds of passes the computer gave numbers within a one-hundredth (0.01) of a second. We're confident in the radar gun's accuracy, just as many other people who use the system are.
While it's not perfect and not a real dragstrip with timing lights, conducting our testing at HPCC has at least one advantage: At LACR the big problem we faced was a lack of traction due to dust from the gravel pit blowing onto the track. sure, we could have the starting area coated with VHT to get sticky launches, but the literbikes would just spin up farther down the track-even through the lights at 140-plus mph. surprisingly, HPCC offers great grip, and even on a cold morning the Hayabusa and ZX-14 refused to spin their tires. that alone makes the acceleration testing much more consistent as well as less stressful.
Another advantage is that we're already on the oval for top-speed testing, and knocking out acceleration runs at the same time ends up being overall more time- and cost-efficient. Back in the dark days before HPCC was available (the facility opened in 1990 and only recently became accessible for private testing) top-speed testing was done, uh . . . shall we say in rogue fashion. More recently we've occasionally had a portion of a road blocked off by police officers for "filming of highspeed motorcycle testing," all above board and proper. But the trouble is that finding a road devoid of traffic, houses and activity requires venturing everfarther from the office; even with said road closed off to traffic there's still danger from tractors crossing the road and sleeping commuters pulling out of a driveway. One final advantage to using HPCC: incredibly, the huge oval is sunk into the ground by a few feet, with the removed dirt banked up alongside and a row of trees planted on top. Both LACR and our clandestine desert test site more often than not had unfavorable winds blowing, but we've had great conditions practically every time on the oval.
At 2070 feet of altitude HPCC is somewhat lower than LACR's 2710 feet, with an appropriately more modest nHRA correction factor. many automotive magazines correct for weather conditions as well, using SAE J1349 to calculate a corrected time based on temperature, humidity and air pressure. Whereas the nHRA correction factor takes into account only altitude and adjusts a run's time and speed to more closely reflect a pass at sea level, the most recent release of the sAE standard corrects weather and altitude to 77 degrees fahrenheit and zero percent humidity at sea level. Using this would allow us to better compare numbers recorded at different times of the year-especially since we deal with temperatures ranging from just above freezing to 100-plus degrees-but may make comparisons with data recorded using the old factors difficult. We'll still correct quarter-mile numbers to sea level using nHRA factors for the time being, but we plan on at least recording the weather and building a database using the sAE standard. Once we've got a few months of hard numbers and can see some correlations we'll make a decision on whether or not to switch over.