Why do my oil pumps break when running Sprint car engines on the engine dynamometer?
Neither our service engineers nor mechanical engineers have never heard of this problem, so we queried an outside source: On Sprint car engines, the same drive mechanism sometimes drives both the oil pumps (dry sump type) and mechanical fuel injection pumps. Timing belts typically drive the oil pumps (and sometimes the fuel pumps) but they can also be driven off the front of the camshaft and connected through a solid hex drive. It should be no problem to run the engine on any dyno, regardless of the drive mechanism used. However, the dynamometer is more forgiving of torsional vibration transmission of energy to drive the oil pump through a timing belt (sometimes called a Gilmer belt or other variation). If driving the dyno through a torsional isolation device such as a drive plate, the torsional vibrations are damped between the engine and the power absorber. If it is driving through a spud drive (female splined hub connected directly to the crankshaft), then no appreciable dampening o
