News-N-Reviews 16th Annual Natural Gas Conference & Exhibition - Put Providence, Rhode Island down as the newest member of the U.S. DOE's Clean Cities program, and the host city for the biggest national NGV trade show in the USA. The American Gas Association and the Natural Gas vehicle Consortium team up for this event designed to expand the markets for NGV's. http://www.ngvc.org I had the supreme honor to both speak at the conference and show my car at the exhibition. A copy of my presentation, "NGV's: Racing Into The Future", is available here. It was good to see the increased participation of the OEM's; Ford, Honda, Toyota and a resurgent GM were all on hand to hawk their "wares". Ford had 2 of the new dedicated NGV Crown Victoria's on display, one as a taxi cab, the other was a police cruiser from the Cumberland, Rhode Island Police Department. For me the highlights were meeting the President of the NGVC, Richard R. Kolodziej, (rkolodziej@ngvc.org), and seeing many old friends in the industry, including; Ed Farell of Dudley Automotive who was manning the booth for the National Alternative Fuel Training Program with Bill McGlinchey, (wmcglinc@wvu.edu) of West Virginia University, David Port the Editor of Natural Gas Fuels magazine, Steve Leahy of the New England Gas Association, Dave Rand of the Mass. Dept. of Energy Resources, Tom Aubee of the Rhode Island-based Alternative Energy Corp., Mike Manning of Boston Gas, Babak Alizedah of Boston-based Alternative Vehicle Services Group, and many more... Along with Safe Alternative Fuel Assoc. President and part-time race car driver, Bert Cox, our presentation included NGV drag racer Joe Mezquita. He showed a video of his cars in action. Bert spoke about racing a NGV Grand Prix with a Corvette engine to a 4th place finish in the SCCA race up Mt. Philo in Vermont. Our session was moderated by Dave Moniz of Providence Gas Company. The mayor of Providence, Vincent Cianci gave a fine speech welcoming the attendees to his city. His last such event was a ribbon-cutting at a pizza parlor. He also asked how many were registered voters of Providence. After his words, free T-shirts were given away by DOE to commemorate the addition of Providence to the long list of Clean Cities. The final day included more sponsored food and drink, as well as an "auction" of donated items. NGV "money" was distributed at the booths to attendees to use in the auction. Although attendance was consider "light" to many who have seen previous events, the industry is still in a state of uncertainty. But there is hope, a new addition to the alternative fuel education community is the Rhode Island-based New England Institute of Technology. Who knows? Maybe there is an NGV race car driver among their students, we can only hope. Emergency Vehicle Operators Course = Mass. State Police Driving School - The former Ft. Devins military base in Ayer, Massachusetts served as the site for a unique gathering of vehicles on Sept. 19th. 20+ 94-96 Impala SS's and a smaller number of former police cruisers (Caprice 9C1's), 2 in-service Mass. Caprice cruisers and one NGV Caprice attended a session of the EVOC especially designed for the GM B-body cars. For only $15 per person, it included coffee and doughnuts (go figure!) 3 hours of classroom training including informative videos on lateral weight transfer, under-steer and over-steer, braking points and the apexes of corners, pizza and soda for lunch, 4 runs on a slalom course set-up on the old runway (20 cones, 75 feet apart) and a "road course". I myself only hit one cone in my 4 slalom runs and none in my 3 road course runs. 9C1 guru Ken Rolt put this event together with the Impala SS Club of New England. The instructor, Steve Charette, told us that close to 600+ Police Package Caprices with the LT1 engines were due to be auctioned off soon. The usual suspects were there, including; Ethan Maass, Alan Smith, Mike Kender, Paul Roswell, Cliff Marano and Peter Fyler. These guys were in their glory driving very fast (the right way) under the watchful eyes of the Mass. State Police. In the back of the old base I did find a horribly wrecked cruiser. Be careful out there! NGV Caprice makes 1/4 mile runs at Lebanon Valley Dragway - Another event sponsored by the mighty Impala SS Club of New England happened on a bright sunny day on August 22, 1998. For the whole story from the source, go to: http://www.impalass.com/lvd/docs/lvd98.html We joined in the ISSCONE convoy at the beginning of the Mass. Turnpike, headed West towards Albany NY. In a surprise move I left the rest area first and decided to pull a typical 9C1 cop-car trick on them. I pulled off the highway and onto the entry ramp from one of the state Transportation Dept.'s maintenance areas... a few minutes later a long column of large mostly black Impala SS's came flying past me, so with a squeal of the tires I launched and caught up with the tale end of their convoy. A few rest stops later we met up with the rest of those in our group and we drove to the Lebanon Valley Dragway. For $10 and a form signing your life away, we were cleaning up the assembled BeaSSts and it is amazing how that little bit of road dust can cut down your ET! Next, off the staging lanes! Oh what a difference a little instruction makes. Put your listening ears on when you are at the track folks... learn from those who have been there before. After a few sets of timed runs, it was time for bracket racing. While I did not participate in the bracket race, I did take notes and admired the fine performances from the grandstands, hoping to do better next time. The abysmal performance of the NGV Caprice can be explained away by the horsepower differences between the 1993 LO5 engine and the later LT1's. The CNG tanks in the trunk also add on a lot of weight. While for the most part the Impala's ran close to 100 mph in 14-15 seconds, I was between 70-75 mph at 17-18 seconds... maybe a supercharger would help? Or the 427 cubic inch dedicated GM NGV truck/bus engine, there is always next year! Happy motoring!