There are seemingly endless secrets in land-speed racing, which makes sense considering we have been running cars as fast as possible in a straight line for over a century. Beyond the obvious wisdom about adjusting for the environment (temperature, air pressure, race surface) and minimizing aerodynamic drag, there seems to be a very deep well of knowledge filled with solutions to other problems unique to land-speed racing. Case in point is the video below, which dropped into my feed a few days ago.

Sometimes the YouTube algorithm is terrifying. It knows me better than I know myself, and I see the proof when it serves up a video with just a few thousand views from a channel that has only posted that single video. I won’t pretend I haven’t wasted a lot of time-consuming piles of content on the internet, but low-view videos aren’t typically what draw me. But the thumbnail image of a massive chunk of billet aluminum with the text “555mph” sang a siren song. I clicked, expecting the video to be clickbait.

It wasn’t.

The video was posted by Traction Products, a business started in 1963 by Peter and Albert Weismann to engineer and produce solutions for high-performance drivetrains. One such problem is the transaxle for a car that is about to attempt a land-speed record. That component is exactly what is discussed here, from the mechanical sequential shifter to the extremely narrow axles to the fascinating reason Traction Products chose not to use a ring-and-pinion setup to turn the power 90 degrees.

The common solutions for multiplying torque and transferring power work really well up to a point, and that point is well under the sort of output and top speeds that this team is working with: 500 mph and thousands, not hundreds, of horsepower. No, that wasn’t a typo: It takes big power to get a vehicle most of the way to Mach 1 on the ground. Multiplying that power through a dozen gears that can be power-shifted is an interesting solution in itself, but even more interesting is that the gearbox serves as the mount for the steering rack, which does not transfer power ring-and-pinion style to the axles.

A ring and pinion setup creates a lot of force and, as I learned from this video, that force is transferred to the chassis of the land-speed race car. That means the car would be fighting itself just as much as the conditions of the race course. So the Weismann transaxle uses a bevel drive to turn the thousands of horsepower, a decision that keeps the twisting force inside the billet case of the transaxle. Voilà: the chassis works like it should rather than fighting itself.

There are all kinds of problems in racing, yet few people get to chase solutions with the mad scientist minds that Traction Products does. It’s fascinating to see a company share its ideas and experiences so freely and we can only hope for more videos and stories from this shop in the future.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post The Secrets of a Transaxle Built for 550 MPH appeared first on Hagerty Media.