Jordon Musser recently put the #iame_sse 175cc shifter engine through it’s paces and shared his thoughts.
If you don’t know Jordon he’s an engineer/ by trade, has a solid racing background and is an all around, no-BS kinda guy.
Checkout @DavinRS’ podast interview with Jordon here:
(Unedited) Transcript from the Jordon’s video on the SSE
Hi, my name is Jordan muster from three g cart racing burrell art and it’s been a lot of negative information going around about the new IAME SKUSA 175 motor. I was fortunate enough to, uh, get to drive this weekend along with my teammate and Michael Labia. So I thought I’d share some of that experience that you guys know. There’s a lot of people that just don’t like change a yes, you, uh, even though a lot of times we don’t think about it consciously, subconsciously, whenever you have something that’s different, your first reaction is to not like it. Well, it’s definitely different. Not a got a chance to drive. I definitely had some positive things and a couple of things that I hope they work on a like to share those with you, you know, for me a reliability, cost and pARITY. The most important with performance or power maybe lasts.
I’d rather have an expensive package, a that’s even with everybody. There’s no distinct advantage thing. Much money and it make three horsepower than 50. But I think what we’ve got here with this amie motor is maybe a little bit of all three. I know the pricing that they’ve released so far looks very good even when built motor by your favorite builder for me, Fisher. But I know there’s other good ones out there too, should be on par with what you’re paying for a Honda, which is good. Plus you won’t have to deal with your motor builder maybe scavenging the junk yard for use a cylinders. They have the right casting number or whatever because all the cylinders are our CNC. Um, you know, parody wise, like I said, with the, with the, it’s really important because I think peridex or drives up costs pretty quickly.
And with these cylinders being all built for a car and all brand new, uh, not cast where the cast, but then machine afterwards they should be a lot more even a Michael and Iran nose to tail for a quite a bit. And so he races, uh, last week and it a decay with TB. KC and the, um, uh, you know, package c unit or even a. If he made a mistake, I’d pull up on him. If I made a mistake, I pulled a, you know, he pull up on me. So I think, uh, that shows the motor pre pretty even. Um, you know, so that’s, I think pretty important. Reliability, who knows, nothing blew up. So I guess that’s a good start. I would put 100 laps each probably on the motors and so far so good. You know, time will tell. I can’t really comment too much on that.
Um, you know, a drivability wise, it’s got a lot more power, lot more torque. So yeah, it’s a little harder to drive. Uh, the only really maybe negative I had to say about that was it was hard to be as consistent with the throttle. I know there’s some joke about number of springs on the throttle pedal here based on some posts, Ebay, but all reality with the butterfly carb and the geometry of the arm on the throttle cable, uh, you actually have an increase in ratio, which typically on an engine, especially high performance, one, you want a ratio decreases or it, you want to phrase it, but basically at the beginning of the throttle throw, you want to throttle the first 40 percent or so to be really insensitive. So maybe you have to move the throttle pedal 50 percent to get a 30 percent on the car.
And then you pick up the last 70 percent of the car, throw with the last 50 percent of your throttled health wrote, makes the engine more easy to easier to drive. Your control tour is really in the day all your throttle was doing is controlling torque and airflow ultimate results. How much torque we needed to retire. Uh, so any race car you look at a old school mechanical throttle body stuff or electronic even control, you’ll see a curve where it’s very nonlinear for the first 40 percent or so, the throttle position and this carberry actually does the opposite. It actually more aggressive and it gets less aggressive. It’s decreasing as you get towards the top end. So I think they need to work on that, but it’s simply a control arm on the throttle. So we were running on a really high grip track of small track.
So we’re, this motor, maybe not shine, but it was faster for sure. Uh, I have second four tenths faster on a 35 second lap track, top speed on 80 miles an hour, so pretty, pretty slow, long, not for long straightaway. Um, and surprisingly enough tire was actually really good at a probably better than my Honda now attributed part of the race track, but a lot of the motor to, I don’t know to be accurate on all tracks I think was slippery tracking I’ll be. But a denton is super high grip so you don’t get a lot of wheel spin, but it does tear up the tire actually gets shredded tires pretty quickly here a den. And with this motor I could actually carry two different years in a corner. It was pretty major Undergrad Strip promoted ads. It’s abroad power bank. It’s that broad a like one.
I let you guys know the trap, but turn one his fourth year in a Honda period, uh, with this motor I was actually able to use fifth or fourth, fifth being kind of tire saving year. Then fourth being the slightly faster gear turned to same kind of thing. Uh, in a Honda it’s third gear, um, in, uh, in this mode and assignments. One five, I can do it third or fourth. And it was pretty close to St Pete. Um, I never had used second year anywhere on track. We’re a Honda. Uses it multiple places so it didn’t get much. Most days you expect the power is so broad. Smooth, it doesn’t hit the hardest part is hard. Feels like it does decimals power. But actually I haven’t seen the scene down curtain’s going off the field, but it doesn’t really feel like it hits as far as you’d expect it to.
With that said, of course, if you’re running that one lower gear in several places, the cards may be a tendency to overlap maybe a little less than that. It’s not a lot. Uh, so I’m wondering if that’ll introduce some more interesting racing on these long finals that we have a excuse, like we are in a 30 lap final last night. I’m wondering what will happen in the pro racing when you have a 20, 25 lab final minute long track? Well, some drivers maybe their chassis is really good and they get out in front and they can now start conserving tires by using one a lower gear. And now, uh, if they do get pressure towards the end of the race, they can start using a higher gear and, and, and, you know, pick up and pull out some gaps. So kind of interesting. Um, so overall had a great time.
The motor is super fast. I mean, I think you really realize you was driving over yourself much faster. It is until you start racing with either other Honda’s, which we did. I was mixed class for Michael and I were kind of dissect a little bit and a couple of tattoos on the straightaway or something aside and like grab. We are really hauling ass here, you know, is, it feels faster a lot faster, especially when you’re banging doors. Somebody. Um, so overall a good motor real happy with it. Uh, there’s some stuff to work on. I’d say that I’d like to see schools that go out and make some changes maybe to the way the carburetor linkages, minor change, you know, I mean obviously we can come up with some fancy contraption on the chassis to do it, but if you’re building a motor specifically for a meal for this class and it’s, it’s SPEC.
So it’s not like if you give up a 10th of horsepower on something, it’s going to matter to everyone the same. So the throttle linkage, a digressing a little too much here. So throttle linkage I’d like to see changed. I’m just a simple, some simple geometry solutions. I made the suggestion to Brian Fisher, who is talking regularly with, uh, Tom Kutcher excluza to try to work on some ways to improve this thing. Uh, I like to see either the head or changed or the pipe change and I’m sure the pipe is made by the thousands or tens of thousands for the AC motor. So the product had changed ads, pretty complicated weldment that’s probably robotically welded out of the space or they have on these awesome people that ambulant give you more seats up room. It’s almost as bad as actually it’s worse, in my opinion, a streetwise mounting Honda.
Uh, the second stretch really difficult and there’s no reason to do that again, when it’s all the same. Might as well if we lose a half a 10th of horsepower because we put a angled spacer and the exhaust, it’s St everybody now it gives me a promoter of seat stress easier. It’s just, is it a big deal? No, but if we’re introduce this new modus was the perfect recording, let’s do it right. And also it gives more of the chain guard. We run windows, kg plastic carbon chain guards, and he was rubbing the pipe a little bit because it’s the same thing. Pots pretty low. Overall package fits awesome. So happy to have a real go kart motor on instead of a Honda with things asked in the right way. And the Antigo in Norway. Um, like I said, it drove great, super reliable. Uh, so far, uh, it’s fun to drive a tire where it was actually better.
Although again, we have more powers as you can do. I mean I’m strong slippery tracks and certain facilities, especially with drivers that maybe don’t have as good a throttle control, you’re going to see increased tire wear. Um, I think that’s just a fact no matter what I saw. And, and Microsoft, same thing. We had very little tire wear so you know, who knows, a circular pregnancy, the same thing we saw and then other people are going to clean it on tire wear. Um, you know, see how chains go. All the other kind of stuff that may wear out faster with a higher power. But we saw no issues, uh, ran like clockwork, so we had 52 laps of racing alone, um, and talk with qualifying everything else in between two cards and no broaden. So anyway, I just got to think, you know, three d cart racing and hurricane psl, a fishery racing engines and obviously real art, uh, I wouldn’t even be able to do this one for them.
And of course, who’s an ime for giving an opportunity to test this thing, give them feedback, you know, it’s, I know it’s getting close associate running six next year, so I’m glad to see that they’re getting some prolo drivers involved to look at setup. I know billy musgrave drove it and had a similar overall positive results. I’m sure he has some things he wants to see changed, but if you ask 10 people what they want to see motor, you’ll get probably 10 different responses. So, uh, for me, parody, price and reliability, and hopefully you’ve got all three and looking forward to driving this smart. Thank you.