See The Davis Profiler Stop Radial Tire Spin At Insane Speed

A few months back, we highlighted the incredible speed of Davis Technologies’ lineup of traction control and wheel speed management systems — measuring literally in billionths of a second resolution between pulses of the driveshaft sensor at speed. If you’re curious how that looks and works in practice, radial tire racer Ray Morton and his tuner, Pete Harrell, put this on fine display at the recent Lights Out 14 event in Valdosta, Georgia.

Morton, driving his twin-turbo, big-block-powered 1989 Chevrolet C1500 pickup, drove to the win at in the hotly-contested no-time Pro Truck class, and certainly had both Harrell and his Davis Technologies Profiler to thank. Because of the inherent design of a radial tire and how power management and the suspension setup are approached to minimize wheel speed, it is notoriously difficult to catch and stop slip very early in a run. If you don’t catch them quick, and if the removal and subsequent re-application of power aren’t approached carefully, it’s all over with. But Davis’s products are up to the task.

Some data from the Pro Truck final, supplied by Harrell. “Maximus was working hard to get down a track that was totally gone at this point. The yellow line is timing. The Profiler catches it twice before 60 feet. Ray pedals it at 60 feet to make sure it’s hooked up. Then, wheelie control catches a power wheelie at 2 seconds into the run and sets the front down. There was a lot going on to get the win,” he explains.

Morton and Harrell struggled during part of the week with tire-slip right at the hit, making a number of adjustments along the way to get the truck through the first half of the run. During one of his rounds of competition, Morton’s pickup spun within the first few revolutions of the tire — at 0.3 seconds, according to Harrell’s data — and without the Profiler, that would have practically spelled doom for his day.

Instead, the Profiler caught the slip, retarded the ignition timing and used its Smart Drop feature, which drops cylinders in a carefully choreographed cycle, to “drop” four cylinders to park the tire, and then poured all of the power back in almost faster than your eyes and mind can register what you’re seeing. Harrell says, in fact, that all of this was done within a span of .02 seconds.