Dr. Rob Tuluie has announced that he will skip the F-USA/CCS Race of Champions weekend at Daytona International Raceway October 17-21 and instead take his Tul-aris 780 back to the lab for continued development over the winter.

A press release issued by Tuluie stated: “Our next goal is to continue off-season development on the power valve engine. Once assembled, we will begin tuning this new motor at Hot Seat Performance on their engine dyno sometime in November. Using Hot Seat’s dyno will allow us to make use of their extensive experience as well as allow quick engine configuration changes. We will focus on setting up the Polaris-supplied power valve solenoid, complete with an adjustable electronic controller, custom-made for us by Jim Hubert of DCM Services. Thereafter, we will continue with minor porting, cylinder head, crankcase, exhaust pipe and ignition curve modifications in order to have a reliable and powerful package ready for Daytona 2002. The goal will be to arrive at a stable engine configuration that will not have to change during the next racing season. This should reduce the mid-season work level substantially. Final verification of this engine configuration will occur on Doug Lofgren’s dyno at Manley Cycle sometime in the December time frame, with a possible off-season test date somewhere warm and dry.

“A dynamic handling computer model of the Tul-aris is undergoing an expansion to a full 3-D simulation. Previously, we had been able to simulate fully non-linear 2-D events, such as riding the virtual motorcycle straight up over a bump (a 2×4!) and similar planar maneuvers. We compared the simulated result (it took 4 hours of PC crunching time to compute a 30-second simulation!) and the measurement from an actual test and found excellent agreement. Now we will include cornering events. We already have all measurements for the Tul-aris chassis stiffness, hysteresis and damping, as well as the standard suspension damping and kinematics. A few measurements remain, for which we will use MTS equipment during the off-season. Our previous model was Pro-Mechanica based, but right now Greg and I are looking into converting it to ADAMS instead. The goal is to have the first true motorcycle racing dynamics simulation software, fully validated on actual test equipment. The last point (the one about validation) is very important if these simulations are to mean anything, else you’re just playing games and hoping your software’s answer is right. Once we have this and perform independent lab tests on the MTS equipment to make sure the model predicts the correct dynamics, we can perform racetrack set-up evaluations on the computer before having to try them out on the track. Since we’ve gathered quite a bit of track data this year with our PI system, we can hopefully start comparing model data to real data sometime this winter.”

Tuluie says that he is also working on an agreement to gain use of an East Coast University’s wind tunnel over the winter. However, Tuluie is still looking for a cash sponsor to help defray their travel costs associated with racing the Tul-airs 780 in the Formula USA Unlimited Grand Prix National series in 2002.