SCORE Journal - The Official Publication of SCORE Off-Road Racing
Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/1508148
WIK RACING ENGINES VW To Class 1 Power Makers By Mike Vieira Specializing in Class 1 and Buggy engines, Adam Wik of Wik Racing Engines started by building VW engines for drag racing. The Las Vegas, Nevada team still builds some VW engines, but most of their racing clients are needing big horsepower for their buggies and SCORE TT Spec trucks. Wik first opened his shop in California’s Orange County in 1992 and moved to Las Vegas in 2000. His wife Becky Freeman got him into off-road racing and he’s been building racing engines for many teams ever since. “All the new machinery, technology, computerized dynos, fuel injection, evolve so quickly,” said Wik. “If you’re not staying up with all the latest and greatest, you’re falling behind. Way back, a Class 1 car used to have 250 horsepower, and that was plenty. Thirty years later, they now have 900 horsepower. I’ve been fortunate enough to be around a lot of types of racing, and you just can’t compare to Baja. It’s its own entity, it’s just amazing.” With the increasing number of all-wheel-drive vehicles, Wik is using a lot of new technology to create some of the high-horsepower engines Class 1 buggy powertrains can handle. Along with this comes data acquisition to see what happens during a particular race. “We love it,” says Wik. “The more data that we can have on a vehicle, the better off we are. Now that bigger teams are using data dash when they race the SCORE Baja 1000, we can download all of it and see exactly how hot it got, what RPM they’re running, and more. 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.”