ECR Engines, a division of Richard Childress Racing, is in the business of extracting maximum performance from conventional, push-rod 5.87 Liter V8 engines for NASCAR competition. The company does this by relentlessly engineering parts to find every possible bit of incremental performance and through systematic quality inspection of all failure prone parts. ZEISS solutions are critical to the company’s daily engineering and quality assurance work.
“We build over 650 high performance engines a year for Richard Childress Racing, JTG Daugherty Racing, Germain Racing, and others,” says Jim Suth, quality manager for ECR Engines, a wholly owned subsidiary of Richard Childress Racing. “We cannot afford a single avoidable failure of any part. One defective component could lead to failure on the track, impacting both championship standing and partnerships, and that isn’t acceptable. To achieve that level of reliability we’ve gone from random sampling to 100% inspection of critical components. That applies both to parts we purchase and those we manufacture. Some of our tightest tolerances are 0.0002 inch (2/10,000). The required gage tolerance rule according to the Automotive Industry Action Group (AIAG) must allow for 0.00002 inch (2/100,000) gage resolution discrimination. That is an order of magnitude smaller than the part tolerance or 150 times smaller than the thickness of an average human hair.”