SCORE Journal - The Official Publication of SCORE Off-Road Racing
Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/1479178
WIKS RACING ENGINES Adam Wik By Mike Vieira photos by jack wright Building racing engines has been a passion for Adam Wik since his early days living in Orange County, California. He’s been in the business for thirty years and specializes in Class 1 and Buggy engines, although he builds engines for most SCORE classes. “We don’t really chase the SCORE Trophy Truck guys, but I do two or three of them, so our main thing is everything else below that,” he says. These days, his shop in Las Vegas, Nevada sees the majority of its work in the LS SCORE TT Spec small-block Chevy engines, but still builds plenty of air-cooled motors, as well Ecotec engines. Wiks Racing Engines counts Wilson Motorsports, RPI Racing, and many others among some of their long-time customers. Wik started out racing Volkswagens on the drag racing scene when he was a teenager in Anaheim. Friends who were doing off-road racing with their Volkswagens started coming to him for help with their engines, and that opened the door for him to a whole new world. He attended a few races and was amazed to see the hundreds of cars, mostly Volkswagens, that were competing. He says, “At that point, I decided to sell all the personal drag race stuff that I had, and try to open an engine shop.” Using money from his earnings from working at his dad’s construction business, and the proceeds from his drag racing cars, he did exactly that in 1992, first in Orange County, then moving on to Las Vegas in 2000. “I was just a motorhead from the beginning,” says Wik. “I always loved working on cars. I wasn’t an off-road racer. But over the years of doing work for guys, I had numerous opportunities to drive and ride with different people in race cars.” He started partnering with Becky Freeman, now his wife, for several years in SCORE races, and they still retain a Class 10 car that they run occasionally. The couple’s sixteen-year-old daughter is now showing some interest in the sport, as well. Engine building has changed over the years, and Wik says that keeping pace with those changes can sometimes be the hardest part of the business. “All the new machinery, technology, computerized dynos, fuel injection, all changes and evolves so quickly. If you’re not staying up with all the latest and greatest, you’re falling behind. Even though some of the off-road stuff has been archaic, compared to some of the asphalt stuff, now with the new four-wheel-drives, they’ve caught up, and they’re using a lot of the technology that would be in other types of racing.” According to Wik, a big reason for that delay in technology in off-roading was the fact that computers just weren’t robust enough to handle the abuse that’s part of Baja racing. With the latest improvements in electronics, that has all changed, and progress has been swift and substantial in recent years. Vehicle telemetry that records the operations of all the systems’ performance during a race is a real benefit to builders like Wik. “We love it! The more data that we can have on a vehicle, the better off we are,” he says. “Now that everyone on the bigger teams is going to a data dash when they go out and run the SCORE Baja 1000, we can download all that and see exactly how hot it got, what RPM they’re running, and we can see everything right there. In the long run, it makes it better for all of us, because we can build a better product, and we can see exactly what all our parts are going through. You can still figure a lot of that stuff out without it, but it takes a massive amount of time.” The evolution of building ever more powerful engines for SCORE racers is linked, hand in hand, to improvements of all the other systems in the race cars. Stronger transmissions and axles allow more power to be put to the ground, improved shocks allow better control at higher speeds, bigger and better tires resist the stresses of higher speeds and provide the traction necessary, better brakes resist fade and provide more stopping power, and on and on, as each improvement in one area, allows increased performance in another. “Way back when, a Class 1 car used to have 250 horsepower, and that was plenty. Thirty years later, they have 900. Everything just gets better,” Wik says. “I’ve been fortunate enough to be around a lot of types of racing, and you just can’t compare to Baja. It’s just its own entity, it’s just amazing.”SJ