BIke Testing,
John Rich and his merry men were, I am sure, responsible for all sorts of unusual ideas when it came to Fiat Abarths. Most people will not remember, or even know that John even had a hand at playing around with the NSU TTS. I knew John at the time, as in the late 60s I helped a fellow by the name of Bill Allen with his NSU. He competed regularly against Ed Dempsey, who drove an Abarth with Rich Motors sponsorship. BTW - Bill Allen went on the win D-sedan at Daytona in 1969 against all the Abarth regulars, including Ed Dempsey.
As I said John tried many, many ideas. For example, less than 5 blocks down the street from Rich Motors was a "fuel company" that specialized in "exotic fuels". Would John have tried some of these over the years? In the years that Rich Motors was building and racing Abarths titanium would have been a REAL exotic material. Just the fact that the JPL name was used in the same sentence says it all. Even today, with all the advances made in titanium metalurgy, the material simply does not have the required stiffness to make for a good crankshaft.
I firmly believe that John ( and Don and Fred Plotkin who built engines and drive for Rich at some point) had worked out that the real enemy in all engines, particularly small displacement ones, was PARASITIC LOSSES. I am sure that the merry men at Rich Motors used whatever was readily available to reduce parasitic losses. This included the troublesome, yet effective, Dykes ring pack. Properly installed and run, in these rings were low friction, yet sealed very well.
I have been preaching the same story for years. Today I use a low friction ring set with a gas-ported top groove to achieve a similar decrease in parasitic losses. I am sure there are others that use other combinations as well. Only in recent years have companies, like Sorevi-Bekaert, come up with viable diamond/carbon coatings that really work. Coatings for piston skirts that utilize a three layer DLC technique really make a difference. I recently did a motor for a client in which various forms of DLC coating were used for piston skirts, push rod ends, rocker arm tips, cam lobes and bearing surfaces, lifters, timing chain gears, connecting rods, to name just some of the components. Even technologies such as Isotropic Micropolishing can make for a huge reduction in gearbox and drive train losses. Can you see the difference on a dyno? In one word, YES.
Sadly, John is no longer with us. It would have been neat to pick his brain, as I am sure that there are things that he tried that were never documented. I am sure that John was not beyond a little psychological warfare. Perhaps he planted the titanium crankshaft story just to "stir the pot" a little. Or maybe it was to distract all concerned from something else that he was playing around with. We will never know.