When renowned land-speed racer Rick Vesco tries to break the 500-mph barrier later this summer, a little bit of Tucson will be along for the ride.
Vesco hopes the advanced turbine-engine controls that Tucson-based Arizona Turbine Technology has supplied for his Turbinator II streamliner’s helicopter engine will put him over the top in his quest for a new class world record for a wheel-driven car.
Vesco has his sights set on being the first to pilot a wheel-driven car to an official speed over 500 mph, but he notes that a lot of other racing groups are set on the same goal.
“The holy grail is to be the person who goes 500 in a car,” he said.
Arizona Turbine Technology, founded in 2014 by University of Arizona alumnus David Crowe, provides advanced controls for industrial turbine engines used in generators and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, pumps for the oil and gas industry.
The company’s controllers use special software that monitors engine performance and modifies fuel flow by the millisecond for greatest efficiency, said Crowe, the company’s CEO.
“We can test the technology in a lab, but how cool is to test it on the salt flats?” said Crowe, who will travel to Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats to help with the record attempt with on-site tuning.
Vesco, who broke his first land-speed record on a motorcycle as a 16-year-old in 1961, said the Tucson company’s technology will help him break the wheel driven record of 458.481 mph his late brother, Don, set in 2001 aboard the Turbinator II’s predecessor. He plans to do that at Bonneville later this summer.
5,000 horsepower CAR
The Turbinator II’s power plant was familiar to Crowe, who worked for turbine engine maker Honeywell as a young engineer and has since worked to develop controls to adapt aircraft turbines to industrial use.
Put one of those bad boys in a car and, well …
“We have a unique situation here where we have a helicopter engine with about 5,000 horsepower in a race car,” said Vesco, who — along with his late father, John, and his brother — is a member of the Dry Lakes Racing Hall of Fame.
Vesco said Arizona Turbine’s technology will help manage exhaust gas temperature from the Turbinator II’s Lycoming T55 gas turboshaft engine, which limited performance when his brother set the record.
Perhaps more importantly, the local company’s electronic engine-management technology can control wheel spin, automatically adjusting for changing conditions within milliseconds as the car travels down the course, Vesco said.
“There is no human that operates that quickly, so it’s safer,” Vesco said, adding that the system also can automatically shut down power in an emergency.
That’s a key capability when running a car on Bonneville’s salt-crust surface, Vesco said in a phone interview from his office in Rockville, Utah. Racing groups have struggled to deal with degradation of the salt surface.
Bonneville’s Speed Week was canceled the last two years because of wet weather and degraded course conditions, said Vesco, who co-founded a group advocating restoration of salt lost from nearby mining.
Speed Week, run by the Southern California Timing Association, is so far still on for Aug. 13-19.
Organizers say one 8-mile course is ready, along with 5-mile and 3-mile courses, but Vesco said the Turbinator II ideally needs an 11-mile track.
While turbojet- and turbofan-powered cars relying on jet thrust have topped 700 mph, Turbinator II’s turboshaft setup transfers power to the wheels.
Because the Turbinator II is heavier than the Turbinator that Don Vesco drove in his record run, Rick Vesco says if the latest racer gets the record it would be in a different class.
ARIZONA TECHNOLOGIES
The Vesco project has brought in other local partners of Arizona Turbine Technology.
Pirtek Palo Verde, a custom industrial hose service, is providing all of the hoses and related components for the Turbinator II including hydraulic hoses and fuel lines.
“It’s pretty cool that they’re breaking their own record and can keep it going,” said Matthew Mejia, general manager of the local Pirtek operation.
“It takes us into a whole different industry, with our hoses and our company,” Mejia said. The company is a sponsor of Tucson Speedway, which runs NASCAR races, and parent Pirtek USA sponsored an Indianapolis 500 race car this year.
Though the work with the land-speed racer is exciting, Crowe seems just as excited about Arizona Turbine’s main business.
Crowe started Arizona Turbine in 2014, soon after leaving a company he co-founded, Tucson Embedded Systems. Arizona Turbine, which has seven employees, is working to develop higher-efficiency fracking pumps, including a current project refurbishing two mobile fracking rigs.
The company is partnering with a Norwegian firm on a new, more powerful fracking-pump design.
With a stack of helicopter engines at Arizona Turbine’s shop on South Nogales Highway, Crowe also is looking to make integrated turbine generating systems for industrial uses. And the company is partnering with Honeywell to industrialize Honeywell’s AGT-1500 turbine — which powers the M1 Abrams series of main U.S. battle tanks — by incorporating it into a multi-fuel, one-megawatt generator.
One generator design Crowe’s company is developing is capable of generating 3 megawatts of continuous power, using multiple fuels including gases released in oil drilling and usually burned off at the wellhead.
The use of so-called “flare gas” would give operators on-site access to free fuel, while excess heat from the generators can generate fresh water from steam.
“We’re taking military technology and reapplying it,” Crowe said.
“If we can generate 3 megawatts of electricity on throw-away fuel and produce fresh water at the same time, that’s a good deal,” he said.
Crowe, a Yuma native who got his first job as a UA engineering grad in 1989 at Honeywell Aerospace in Oro Valley, said much of the technology he’s developing is Arizona-based.
“To me,” he said, “it will be good day when that is all done here in Arizona.”
