Читать книгу Practical Engine Airflow - John Baechtel - Страница 5

DEDICATION

To Louie Hammel

My amazing friend Louie Hammel had a fondness for the impossible, frequently offering simple yet profound quips about engine performance that made you stop and think and, more important, imagine. Louie suffered for many years from the debilitating effects of leukemia and has since passed on, but I will always remember the day he looked at me and said, “You know, I’m an engine guy and when I die I want to be cremated and have one of you guys pour my ashes through the carburetor on a screaming high-RPM big-block on the dyno so I can watch all this stuff we talk about first hand.”

Unfortunately Louie never achieved his goal, but I often wish he had because his reports from the other side would have been awesome and unquestionably accurate. He always wanted a personalized license plate that read TORQUE, and he had a million ideas about ways to generate it and improve engine performance. Although I was busy with a career at Hot Rod and Car Craft magazines, Louie honed his skills testing and developing parts in the dyno rooms at Edelbrock and later became a researcher and dyno technician at McFarland, Inc., evaluating and developing high-performance components for Jim McFarland.

Later, after Louie became sick, he used to come by my dyno shop in the afternoons and weekends and we would bench race engine tech and theory endlessly. Whenever something stumped us, we immediately thought to “ask Louie,” whereupon he addressed our question with the thoughtful power of his amazing intellect. That made some people jealous, but he only sought to offer well-thought-out opinions, and he usually had a perfectly good explanation that solved our problem.

Louie was no poser. He never cared if he impressed anyone or what others thought of his ideas. He thought well beyond that and was truly immersed in the magic of engine performance and, in particular, the science of engine airflow. If I’ve learned anything over all these years, much of it came from Louie’s remarkably thoughtful questions and subsequent discourse on said matters. Many of us miss Louie even to this day and can’t forget the remarkable impression he left on us. And thus I dedicate this book to him, an exceptionally observant and knowledgeable man.

Somehow I think he still may have managed to find his way inside a running engine and he is still in there, taking notes and preparing reports for his old friends who still feel the need to “ask Louie.” R.I.P., buddy.

This photo was shot at Jim McFarland’s think tank R&D shop in Torrance, California, in the early 1990s before Louie was diagnosed with leukemia. That’s an early GM ZZZ engine on the dyno. Left to right: Kevin McClelland, Rod Sokoloski, Louie Hammel, Keith Rudolph, and Jim McFarland.