OKLAHOMA UNIVERSITY RACE TEAM VISITS TOMBO RACING

JANUARY 27, 2023 - This week, the University of Oklahoma Sooner Racing team returned the favor and visited the Tombo Racing shop in Oklahoma City. These young engineering students were interested in learning tips and tricks from Tommy Bolton’s decades of drag racing experience. They spent over an hour at the race shop talking to Tommy and drag racer Kermit Lottie.

After a tour of the shop and watching a few racing videos, the talks quickly turned technical and included topics like ECU tuning, building a custom oil pan for efficient oil pickup at high G forces, how Tommy and Kermit built a custom header that quickly and easily bolts onto the billet aluminum blocks designed for Tombo Racing engines, connecting rod shape and design, and other highly technical topics. The Sooner Race Team offered expertise in carbon fiber layup and CNC machining.

Tommy Bolton discussed oil pan and connecting rod design for high-horsepower applications in Tombo Racing’s newly created engine building room.

This crop of OU students will soon be graduating and moving on to jobs in aerospace engineering and automotive engineering and others will take their place. They will spend time this spring helping at drag races at Thunder Valley Raceway, while Tommy plans to help them with their project fundraising.

Tommy rolls out one of Tombo Racing’s “no-bar” bikes – no wheelie bar – so that the students could get a better look at the exhaust header design and how the exhaust pipes enter the collector. The discussion centered around how to build exhaust systems for quick removal and installation in between races.

A motorcycle racing legend and young up-and-coming talent team together – just like Tommy learned from Byron Hines and Honda Jim as a youngster in the race shops of Southern California.

Experience teams with youth. Tommy Bolton and Kermit Lottie of Tombo Racing were honored to be sharing their decades of racing experience to the OU Sooner Racing Team.