 Older Article | Newer Article |
Col Parish - From the mountain to the stream..
by Sean Henshelwood
As featured in; 321 Ignition Magazine #2
Circuit racing has ‘Black Jack’ Brabham, Larry Perkins, Les Small and Ron Harrop, speedway has John Sidney, drag racing Terry Sainty.. The list goes on. Engineers that are renowned for Aussie ingenuity and good old fashioned engineering excellence..
The Australian Jetsprint scene is no different, in fact the name Col Parish came from within the speedway and circuit racing ranks, but like the aforementioned ‘gurus’, Col Parish has made his name amongst the sports luminaries through boat racing, but not just any boats, JET boats..
We caught up with the Wangaratta native at the final round of the 2007 Australian Jetsprint championships as he danced around like a cat on a hot tin roof in anticipation of another championship win for one of his favourite drivers and a long time friend, Nathan Pretty..
It was a testing time for Parish, who is responsible for the True Blue team of Phil and Louise Dixon (Superboat) and Nathan and Brooke Dixon who share the team’s 400ci Group A machine, which was suffering from a rare oil leak. “It’s only minor, but with the series this close, it’s something we don’t want,” Parish admitted with a crease in his forehead.
For Parish through the Albury event wasn’t just a matter of keeping a watchful eye on the Dixon family team, the master engine builder was also responsible for the many competitors at the event in his role as the ‘outgoing’ President of the AFJSA (Australian Formula Jet Sprint Association). “What he doesn’t know is that he’s going to be made a life member of the AFJSA tomorrow for his tireless work for the category,” new President Greg Harriman whispered in my ear.. The award the AFJSA believed was the least they could do for a man widely recognised as playing a big part of putting Jetsprints firmly on the map in Australia, laurels that don’t rest well with Col.. “I don’t know about all of that, I just enjoy my sport and I figure that whilst I’m here, if I can help others who want to help the sport I will..”
And so we started the interview...
I go back as far as 1966 when it comes to an involvement in motorsport - that’s when I got my first speedway car. I lived on the farm so you kind of had to learn everything for yourself and learn how to make things, so it was a bit of a natural progression to have a go on the dirt tracks around Victoria and NSW.
My first car was an FJ Holden and I adapted a Singer 4-speed gearbox to it and went racing. In about 1968 I started working for Repco in their workshop, so I was basically surrounded by the sport from then on.
I didn’t have much involvement with the Jack Brabham Repco era, but I was fortunate to be involved with Repco’s Phil Irving who developed the Holden 308 engine into a Formula 5000 powerplant, so I was able to go down to Maidstone in Melbourne and go through the workshop and see what was happening on the dynos.. It was one of those amazing things - money can’t buy that kind of experience. Just out of the blue one day, they said they had an ex-Frank Matich engine from a car he’d raced in the United States and it had run a big-end bearing. It was complete with Lucas timed injection - it was a beautiful engine for its day, and they told me that if I was going to build a new speedway car that I could have that engine..
I rang up the local Holden dealer, which was about 1976/77, and I asked to buy a new hatchback Torana body - an A9X bodyshell, and they said I’d be unlikely to get one, because Peter Brock didn’t even have one yet. So then I rang Holden direct at Dandenong and they arranged for me to get a brand new body and hatch, which I remember was about $1140.. It was a true A9X because the suspension mounts were different, there was no body deadener in it at all, it was just a plain steel body shell. So I wandered down to Dandenong with a tandem trailer, picked the car up and came home to fit the Repco Formula 5000 engine. With Lucas injection it was just far too wild for dirt, so I swapped it for a Muncie gearbox.
I converted the injection to two Holleys and away we went. We had a lot of success with that car, it was beautiful - the rear tyres were 24 inches wide, which these days is unheard of, and probably in those days wasn’t the optimum, but it was all about bigger is better.. I campaigned that for quite a few years and in the meantime had started my own business in Wangaratta in around 1979/80 called Parish Automotive. It was a general automotive workshop, but I kept up with all the latest high performance stuff, working on my own gear and on customers engines from all over the country, partly due to my success in speedway. Even to this day I still have a lot of contact with people in speedway and have become a life member of the Wangaratta Speedway Club which I’m pretty proud of, and still do a lot of speedway engines, but not near as much as I did in the early days.
I moved on from there to circuit racing. One thing I’d always wanted to do was go to Bathurst and out of the blue one day I got a call from Alan Jones and Warren Cullen to ask me if I’d like to go to Bathurst with them and give them a bit of a hand in the pits. I thought it was a sensational opportunity to work with their engine builder Tom Coad, who was a lot older than I was, but he took me under his wing and taught me an awful lot about the 308 Holden engine. I believe in those days that our team had the best engine, they were just awesome the power the Coad engines had and if it wasn’t for a string of bad luck, we might have won up there. I remember one year we ran out of fuel on top of the mountain whilst we were leading, and ended up fourth I think. So I did a couple of seasons with them and it gave me a lot of confidence to show that I could go a lot further in the field..
Probably the next thing that happened was that I was working away one day and Nathan Pretty’s Dad (Daryl) walked in and introduced himself and asked if I would be interested in building young Nathan a 253 Holden because the Thunderdome had just taken off, and they were introducing a ‘Sportsman’ class for a stock 253 with a Holley on top. They’d had a few engines built in Melbourne but nobody seemed to understand the rigours of the Thunderdome and how it was different.. That’s a bit the same as Jetboats as still not a lot of people understand Jetboating.
So I built a couple of 253s and Nathan went really well, then I built a couple of engines for Steve and Fiona McDonald, Nicole Pretty and had a bit to do with the Jones boys (Brad and Kim). I learnt a lot down there which was a bit of an eye opener. The Thunderdome was all about running wide open throttle for 100 laps, so the engine tune was a lot different to how you’d tune an engine for somewhere like Winton where you’re on and off the throttle, so it was a great learning experience.. I really enjoyed the Thunderdome and it put me in contact with guys like Les Small and Larry Perkins, both of whom I idolised as very clever engines builders, but both were very difficult to gain information from. Having said that though we had trouble with oil surge on the Thunderdome and I needed a special 308 sump and I just couldn’t get a handle on it. I rang Larry up and he sold me a sump and sent it to me with fitting instructions that basically said.. "It’s pretty easy when you think about it cock.." The way he’d fabricated the pickup inside the sump was amazing, it showed just how clever a guy he really is..
The goal was always to be able to beat guys like Larry, Les and John Sidney - as an engine builder you always need a challenge and that was mine. To have Nathan, or Fiona McDonald go out and win a race after leading for 100 laps with an engine built up here in Wangaratta in my workshop gave me a great feeling of accomplishment.
These days I get the same thrill out of seeing young Brooke (Dixon) and Nathan in the Jetboats giving the opposition a hiding.. Maybe that’s the competitive ‘mongrel’ in me..
In Wangaratta a young guy named Steven Didcoe had just picked up on this new sport called Jetboating - he was only about 16-17 years old at the time.
The first track was built in South Australia at a place called Goolwa, then Steve’s father built a track at Wangaratta just behind the drive-in theatre and Steve started driving but they lost one engine after another, and eventually Steve’s father came to see me to ask me to build an engine. I agreed, as I’d been to a few of the races and I could see what was going on, it was more than just horsepower, you had to be able to tune the engine.
The characteristics are different to other engines in motorsport, because it’s got to pull from 1200-1500 rpm and have bucket-loads of torque, and it’s got to keep that torque all the way through to six grand, and it’s difficult to build an engine to do that, you’ve got to be able to tune it otherwise they’ll just detonate and destroy themselves.
Oil surge is another major killer of those engines.. It was a real learning curve but I only agreed to do it if I could build the engine, fit it, tune it, do the water system, do the sump.. I did that, and he was looking for a navigator, so my daughter Teresa who was 16 became the navigator, so it became a real family affair, which is one of the pleasures of the sport. My wife and I and my family have been all over the world with this sport, from the USA to New Zealand..
So that’s how we started in Jetboats in the early 90s. It’s been very rewarding, young Theresa and Steve went on to claim two Australian titles, and Steve won 15 races in a row, which will probably be a record forever..
In about 1996 after a few years of following the Jetboat circuit, Teresa said to me that she thought she could drive one.. I told her I thought it was a bit different, with no brakes, no wheels, you can’t get off the throttle, and they steer from the rear end, but that didn’t deter her in the slightest because she wanted to drive..
A guy loaned her a boat and she ended up beating him, so she decided that I better build her a boat of her own.. I built that. It was a pretty boat, and probably one of the first in Australia to run a chrome-moly roll cage, proper drivers seats, and because it was my daughter, I had the feel of her getting hurt in a bad accident.. We certainly set some benchmarks with preparation, some of which are still being maintained today which I’m pretty proud of – a lot of what I learnt with that project rubs off on Phil’s (Dixon) boat, and Phil’s a perfectionist, so I’m proud that he has seen the value of all of that. Anything we do on Phil’s boats has to be spot on, performance wise as well as safety and handling.
With Teresa we got involved with world titles, we went to New Zealand three or four times, we went to the US three or four times to compete - the highlight of which was Theresa finishing third in the world titles in New Zealand in 1998. She was the first female to stand on the podium in a world title event (International Group A - 400 Class). It was great for an engine builder from Australia who built his own engine from the ground up to race in New Zealand and America, Teresa did very well she was always in the top five in America.. In fact whilst we were over there we had a fortnight layoff from racing and I managed to build and engine for a guy called Mark Roberts and I found it incredibly easy.. You didn’t have to make up all the pieces you needed or wait for them to arrive from America for weeks and weeks, you just went down the street and bought everything you needed. In under a week I’d built him a brand new engine from A to Z, and a TV crew filmed me doing it and putting it into the boat for the first run. Mark had a great deal of success with that engine. Unbeknown to me, they made a video of me assembling the engine and commentating all the way through and they gave every member of their association over there a copy of it, partly because we gave them an absolute flogging when we were there because they were so new to it - they were building huge powerful engines that made all their torque at 7-8000 revs, they didn’t understand oil surge and the G-forces, but they were quick learners, we went back the next year and we couldn’t get anywhere near them..
Teresa then decided to get married and start a family, so she was out of the sport, and Phil Dixon came along. He was fairly new to the sport, and he came and asked me to do an engine, and to look at running his whole team.. I was pretty dumbstruck to start with, but it was another pleasing aspect of my life to be so highly regarded by someone I had a lot of respect for.
Phil, Louise and their family have just been amazing to me, and in fact we’ve all been treated like family with them, from my three daughters, to sons-in-law, grandkids the whole lot - it’s been just one fantastic relationship..
Anyway, I’d seen Brooke in the pits, she was about 15 or so and she’d been navigating, then she’d had a drive of a couple of different boats, and I thought by geez that girl is smooth, I could see she had the potential to be every bit as good as Teresa if not better, although these days it’s hard to compare the boats because they’re so different, but I’d hesitate to say that Brooke could have been faster than Teresa ever was. Theresa said that I should give Brooke a drive in her boat, which by this stage was well out-classed, handling-wise, engine-wise and weight-wise, and yet Brooke was always able to finish fifth or sixth in a boat that wasn’t really capable of being anywhere near the top ten. That’s when I think Phil could see her potential and he said, "Col, why don’t we build her a new boat?"
He gave me the opportunity to build the engine I’d always wanted to build, with the very best of everything. I’d often had to build an engine to a budget, and sometimes didn’t need to build the very best I could build in order to be competitive, but now I had the chance to build an engine that was capable of winning a world title. I did that, but had to look well outside of the square I’d been operating in, weight-wise, compression-wise, camshaft design.. That was the first engine I built for Brooke, which was also the engine that Nathan (Pretty) won the world title with, and an engine Brooke still uses today. I think the worst finish that engine has had is second overall..
The hull is a Sprintec, which is based on a Mackcraft (NZ). Peter Caughey takes the Mackcraft boat, modifies all the engine bearers and all the other bits and pieces around it and calls it a Sprintec.. The proof’s in the pudding, they are a fantastic boat, and whilst we’re one of few with them, I’m sure there’ll be a lot more this season.
I’d call the engine a brittle engine.. It’s not the kind of engine you can take out, roar around and treat with disrespect, over-rev it and just keep driving and driving and driving it. We suffered that problem. We won the world title with it, with two drivers sharing the driving duties (Nathan and Brooke) and we kept using it, and it ended up melting a conrod in practice at Melton.
It is a sensational engine, but it doesn’t have a particularly long lifespan, so it’s something we have to continually monitor - we crack test the conrods every now and then, which is our weakest link.
That engine runs a 12.1:1 compression ratio which is right on the limit for the Group A’s control fuel, which is Avgas. Since the world titles at the start of 2007, I’ve rebuilt the engine and knocked a lot of compression out of it, purely because I know that we’re not going to be able to have Avgas for all that much longer - the writing’s on the wall, that the EPA is suggesting that there may no longer be Avgas available beyond this year, and I think it won’t be all that far away when our sport will have to go green. In fact I’ve already run Brooke’s engine on Caltex Vortex Gold, which is a premium unleaded fuel and I believe that engine, now that I’ve knocked some compression out of it goes just as well, if not better than it does on Avgas.
I honestly think we need to head that way regardless, just like the V8 Supercars have done.
Brooke’s engine features a Motown block, which is based on a 400 Chev, but instead of using 400 mains, we use 350 Chev mains, which are a little bit smaller and lighter than the 400. We just use a Lunati crank, which is an off the shelf product because we’re limited to 412 cubic inches – that has a stroke of 3.750 inches. Conrods are just another lightweight item off the shelf.. Being a Chevy, we can just buy all the components from the US or from a supplier in Australia which makes the job pretty easy.
The secret in many engines, but in particular Brooke’s engine is the cylinder heads. We had some cast iron heads CNC ported in America and paid a little extra to have them hand-finished and hand-flowed. They did exactly what I asked for, matched the manifold.. In fact I was pretty lucky, the guys in the States believed a lot of what I asked them, and actually went outside the square themslves to what they would usually do to accommodate me and have created heads that suit our racing perfectly. They have enormous amounts of torque up to 6100rpm, which the boat can run at all day and keep pulling – it doesn’t get to 5000 and drop off, it just keeps pulling all the way through.
The difference between that and the Superboat engine in Phil’s boat is quite significant. I get such a thrill out of looking after and building Phil’s Superboat engine because there’s no restriction. The block is a specially built block, either a Dart aluminium block or a billet aluminium block where the camshaft is shifted up half an inch so that you can get a longer stroke in, we run a 4.500 inch stroke in Phil’s engine which is originally designed for a 3.750, and it’s got a special crankshaft to give the stroke, it’s got a 4.200 inch bore which gives it 498 cubic inches, so it’s a really big small-block..
I looked around to find the best combination, and that’s the biggest engine cubic inch wise you can get out of that little size. You’ve still got the length and width of a small-block Chev - you could unbolt Phil’s engine and put it straight into a Holden Commodore because the engine mounts are in the same spot, the length of the engine is the same, the bell-housing stud pattern is the same, but you’ve got 500 cubic inches!
It was the biggest cubes we could get for the smallest package, and that’s what we wanted. We could go to 600 cubes or bigger, which some people have done, but then you’ve got a weight issue, it’s bigger, longer, wider, and you’ve got that reciprocating mass trying to spin that big fat crankshaft at 6000rpm trying to turn the boat in the opposite direction – it just doesn’t want to work. With Phil’s boat we think we’ve found the right formula, it’s a pretty lively package.
Not a lot of people have realised yet that a Jetboat won’t go one way as well as it does the other if you’ve got too much reciprocating mass. In other words you’ve got that big flywheel and crankshaft that spins around, it’s going one way and the boat wants to go the other.. the lighter you can get that the better..
In International Group A (400 Class) there is a restriction on the inlet size of the carburettor, it has to have four butterflies, and they can be no bigger than an inch and 11/16.. Which is based on a 750 cfm Holley, and that’s all a 412 cubic inch can use at wide open throttle anyway, is about 700 cubic feet per minute, so it’s restricted a bit like NASCAR. It helps to keep the costs down.. The difference between that and say Phil’s Superboat, is that we’ve got mechanical or electronic fuel injection and it’s unlimited. Phil’s engine runs eight, two and 7/8 inch butterflies or injectors, which is huge for a Chev engine, but it’s 500 cubes. It also runs on Methanol – pure alcohol, and whilst there’s all different types of injection, we use the Kinsler system out of the States - it’s a one-off system built by Kinsler, 2 7/8" diameter which is enormous, and the butterflies only control the air, and we inject the fuel with a down nozzle, on top of the inlet valve, in other words we’ve got the injector nozzle tapped into the cylinder head above the spark plug and we inject the fuel straight onto the back of the intake valve.
This isn’t a new system, it’s been developed over the years by Hilborn, Kinsler..
When I first got involved with Phil I hadn’t had a lot of experience with injection, I’d followed it for years and read about it, but Phil being Phil, he wanted the biggest and the best. A lot of people don’t understand a lot about Phil and his intentions, which is not only to go out there with the best looking boat and to win races, but he wants to promote the sport, and he sees that one way of doing that is to have that Superboat and have it with big injection and big trumpets.. The crowd love it, it sounds sensational.. It wasn’t just only to put an injection on it that would work, it had to be the biggest on it that would work..
Phil’s engine, because it has a 4.500 inch stroke, was very difficult to get the conrod length in ratio, right with the length of stroke, so we had to go to a very long conrod, but a very strong conrod and piston combination to make that engine survive. I know when we originally built it, it broke five main bearing caps because the harmonics of the engine were totally wrong – the piston weight was wrong, the length of the conrod was wrong, so that was a costly mistake, but we’ve got it all worked out now..
We went to MoTeC probably three years ago now and it’s made a huge difference. I was from the old school and I didn’t think we needed dynos, and I certainly didn’t think we needed data gear, but we went to MoTeC and did back to back runs on their dyno and learnt so much about both those engines that it was incredible. For us that is all headed up by Peter Sweeney and we are also very fortunate on our race team to have Luke McMillan, who at just 22, has done all his training at MoTeC under Peter, and he does so much behind the scenes work that is a valuable addition to everything else we’ve always done. Where it is of great value to me is that it traces our oil pressure, not so much in Phil’s boat which is dry-sump, but on Brooke’s boat oil surge can just wreck an engine. As an example, we built an engine early in the piece and went to Mackay in Queensland to race and we had two track directions where one went clockwise and one went anti-clockwise, so all of a sudden we had a double oil surge problem – without the MoteC we would have lost the engine that day, because it came in and we had two spots on the circuit where we went from 80 psi oil pressure down to 20 for between one and two seconds, which would have been enough to destroy an engine. All we had to do was lift the oil level up by maybe 800ml, which doesn’t seem much but it went from terrible oil surge to basically none. Without MoTeC we would not have had any idea what was happening to that engine. You could ask the navigator to keep an eye on the oil pressure, but with a mechanical gauge - one they don’t have time to look, and two it may not register on the gauge over a period of a second.. The other use it has is with the different tracks we go to. Some are at sea level, some are above sea level and we have lambda sensors, we have oxygen sensors, and I can tune both those engines by asking Luke for a readout on the exhaust temperature and the oxygen sensors etc etc..
When we first arrived on the scene with the MoTeC it was a bit of a voodoo, and we actually had some drivers that wanted it banned, which I thought was a little bit unsporting of them. Phil was prepared to bring new technology into the sport which is what we needed instead of sitting back running year after year with old antique stuff, we need to advance the sport. There’s nothing worse than seeing competitors going out there destroying engines. There are at least five maybe six teams now that are using MoTeC and I know there’s others out there using a different brand.. The fact that they’re using something is sensational.
- Sean Henshelwood
© 321 IGNITION Pty Ltd 2008
| Older Article | Newer Article |
| Browse 'FEATURES ARCHIVE' | |
