By Gene Yoachum

For the Bremerton Patriot

It was a software glitch, of all things, that kept a Bremerton Porsche racing team from beating their own land speed record of 231.65 mph last month.

The glitch prevented Alex Raphael’s team’s 2009 Porsche 997 twin turbo, named Mayhem, from going faster than 224 mph.

“We’re still the bad boys in town,” Raphael said of the $260,000 racer which set the world record last year, noting the best speed for any other Porsche class racer was 217 mph.

But falling short of the crew’s goal demonstrates all the things that can go wrong when an elite race car tries to travel faster than nature intended.

The Texas Mile is run twice each year on the 8,000-foot-long runway at Goliad Industrial Air Park. Participants in both motorcycles and cars have one mile to accelerate to their highest speeds and a half-mile to shut down and come to a stop.

A vehicle’s top speed is measured in the final 123 feet of the mile of acceleration.

Raphael owns MAXRPM Motorsports, 2320 Sixth Street, Bremerton, where the car was built.

“It might be a handful (to control), but it is legal to drive on the street,” Raphael said of the 2009 Porsche.

Raphael started the high-end garage in 1977 at age 17, but has had his hand in other technical endeavors, traveling the world as a sound engineer for hard rock acts like Metallica, Queensryche and Def Leppard.

And when asked, he can rattle off the details of Mayhem, plus the price.

It has a six-speed manual transmission, with paddle shifters on the steering wheel. The clutch, a three-disc, carbon fiber system, is computerized. The clutch costs $7,000, not including $3,000 for installation.

The engine has a one-piece crankshaft, special rods built to be two- to three-times stronger than the originals. The pistons and cylinders are specially designed using a unique metal compound.

The Porsche even has air conditioning.

An onboard computer logs data about every aspect of the car on each run, measuring acceleration forces, headwinds, drive train and engine performance numbers.

“It’s lots of hours and lots of money,” Raphael said. “You can’t think about it.”

The sacrifices of time and money pay off if the car does well or sets a record in its class.

Evolution Motor Sports of Tempe, Ariz., is a partner in paying for the Porsche racing project. Todd Duccone, Evolution president, does the software tuning, which Raphael said “is an art in itself.”

John Bray does research and development at Evolution and works with Raphael to tune the Porsche’s engine, he said. Raphael added that working on the Porsche to race it at the Texas Mile two times a year is like working on the set of a movie: “There are three or four key people and hundreds of others who are important and integral.”

During competition last year, Raphael said the sunroof on their Porsche flew off during the car’s third run and ended the team’s chances for a record run.

“We had been close to 250 mph before the driver had to pull out of it because of wind issues,” Raphael said. “We had 1,300 horsepower and the potential was there to break it by a big margin…Then the sunroof popped and the driver freaked out and he let off. He still did 224 mph without even accelerating at that point.”

Vehicles accelerate at the Texas Mile at around 5 Gs, Raphael said. That force is much higher than the 3 Gs experienced by astronauts aboard the U.S. Space Shuttle at launch and re-entry, according to figures obtained online.

Raphael said it was disappointing with what happened, but he did not blame the driver for his reactions.

“The acceleration is phenomenal,” he said. “There’s an incredible amount of G-force and performance. It is frightening to go that fast.”