Irrelevant digression on the warm-up thing

["John Hertzman" <johnhertzman@domain.elided>]

I have always (well, since the forties) understood that whole-car rolling warm
ups were ideal, not a static warm-up pre-blastoff, so that not only the engine
and gearbox were at operating temperature but everything else, wheel-bearings,
u-joints, tires, steering box were 'au point'. But in the recent discussion of
meticulous warm-ups, and reminded of Luca's 20 km sub-2000 rpm, my mind
wandered back to the traditional Le Mans start. These days there are warm-up
laps and rolling starts, and tire-warming blankets in the pits, but it was
still an across-the-road driver sprint to the silent cars when I last saw it.
Most of the cars then were already dedicated, prepared race cars but still
closely related to genuine road cars and at least one Ferrari appeared to be a
daily driver with all usual comforts, radio, heater, carpets, wind-up windows,
bumpers, and New York license plates. The whole field ran across the track,
fired-up and turned right peeling rubber with nobody apparently pussyfooting.
Certainly the more serious preparators would have been finely balancing
clearances, viscosities, temperatures in all systems, but it still looked like
a far cry from our car-coddling. Of course they weren't all looking beyond a
few thousand miles.

Tess wrote "I figger there'd be a sensor in the diff or in the tranny if it
was critical. But maybe not..." which reminded me of a pre-race comment in The
Autocar about instrumentation of the Cunninghams, which had transmission and
differential temperature gauges; "In a race such information is often
disturbing and seldom useful."

John H.
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