1973 Grand Am 455 Super Duty

[Keith Seymore]

There are two types of activities that take place at a proving ground: development and validation.

Validation is probably what you are thinking of when you think of the testing. This is where you have rigid test procedures, verifying that the vehicle meets specific regulatory and customer requirements before being sold to the public. There is a team of engineers (usually young, entry level positions*) and drivers who would spend all day doing high speed testing on the circle track, or 8 hours of low speed city traffic, or driveway entry and egress, or emissions testing, or whatever.

Development is where you play around all day. These assignments are usually project based, either improving on an initial/existing design or addressing a specific customer complaint. Often there is no test procedure and the engineer has to create the process of how to evaluate the changes and what the pass/fail criteria should be. Normally this is where the old timers reside.

I did full vehicle development on the C/K trucks (pickups, Blazers and Suburbans) and then, at the DPG, driveline and brake development. Some memorable projects were various brake pulls and pedal feel issues, throttle calibrations, driveline vibrations and noises including launch shudders and rear axle noise and the like, both on the road and in a chassis roll dynamometer cell, and captaining off property road trips to Death Valley or Pikes Peak and other western locales.

I think I was pretty good at fixing stuff but my weakness was in determining what was “good enough”. Having grown up around tri-power Pontiacs with rock crusher transmissions I might have had a greater tolerance for various moans, groans and whines than the typical engineering manager.

I remember one time my boss took me out for a ride in a manual trans truck. Shifting through the gears and pointing out the gear whine he said “hear that? You gotta fix that.”

“Fix it?” I said. “I like it!”

K



*most of these entry level engineering positions were what we would call “5th level” or “6th level” jobs. Because I started in the assembly plant I came into engineering directly as a 7th level engineer, giving me a level or two head start on my peers. All according to plan: 8th level was the “carrot” which is when you were assigned a company owned vehicle. I got my 8th in October of 1991. Everything went pretty much according to plan until "The Unpleasantness of 2008".

[Keith Seymore]

Originally Posted by Keith Seymore

Development is where you play around all day. These assignments are usually project based, either improving on an initial/existing design or addressing a specific customer complaint. Often there is no test procedure and the engineer has to create the process of how to evaluate the changes and what the pass/fail criteria should be. Normally this is where the old timers reside.

Those first couple moves occurred as I was replacing an older gentleman who was retiring.

The guy from Milford was named Hayes Hoboth. He was probably involved during the creation and development of dirt.

About that same time I had just finished reading Delorean’s book “On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors”. In it he describes this time when an engineer was trying to emulate the ride/handling of some MOPAR model and had procured a steering gear from that model. He had the gear put into one of our vehicles and was told the car was ready to drive. After clearing the hoist he turned the wheel to exit the building and immediately backed into a post. Trying to move forward he hit a couple more stationary objects before judiciously shutting everything down.

Turns out the gear was “front steer” and the car he put it in was “rear steer” (or vice versa, or whatever) and so the road wheels were turning in the opposite direction of the steering wheel. They hadn’t comprehended that prior to going for a drive.

Anyways – I went to Hayes’ retirement party. As the night wore on the stories got more animated and began to flow more lubriciously. At one point one of his buddies gets up and starts telling this story about how Hayes got this steering gear and then wrecked the car before he could even get out of the garage.

Turns out the guy I was replacing was the guy in Delorean’s book.

K