It’s a given: we are living in a technology-driven world. We cannot forget that our world came about thanks to visionary people who took the time to develop original ideas to solve problems, both in real life and micro-scale. These are the people who chased down a dream to achieve perfection in design.

Flowmaster’s rich and innovative history has been powered by a dream to build the best technologically advanced performance exhaust products on the planet. That one dream has been at the forefront of Flowmaster founder Ray T. Flugger’s mind for over forty years.

Flugger’s most innovative design centers around the creation of the chambered muffler design, one he perfected out of years of innovative thought and testing.

According to Flugger, “It all started when I realized that there had been virtually no new technology developed for exhaust since just after World War II. We knew open exhaust changed performance but no one could pinpoint quite what was happening or really whether it was a plus or minus situation. “I started to figure out just what went on inside the exhaust system and discovered there was a lot of interaction happening.”
Flugger looked over every existing muffler design and soon discovered that virtually all of them inhibited exhaust flow. “I remember testing traditional glass-pack mufflers and found they restricted flow yet produced a pleasing rounded frequencies I wanted. That got me thinking about how I could design a muffler that could improve flow and create a great sound.”

His reading and research took him through many avenues of thought but he focused on an article he had seen in an old motorcycle magazine. It described the impact of exhaust flow on headers and confirmed how the exhaust pulse involved sound, heat and airflow, just as Flugger suspected.

This eventually lead him to realize that a combination of valve overlap, head designs, tubular structure and muffler design could help create a scavenging effect in the exhaust, leading to a real-time horsepower and torque increases.

In some ways, it was a sunrise moment when Flugger further realized that one of his designs created an interesting tone when tested. He also discovered that there was an enormous range of frequencies (20 to 20,000 cycles) in exhaust sound and this meant he would have to learn how to manage them effectively.

In doing this basic nuts-and-bolts work, he found that he could actually manage the airflow, heat-transfer and sound. He developed his design, positioning plates within a muffler by trial and error and then formulated an engineering concept that is the basis of Flowmaster-chambered mufflers to this day.

Flugger found he could vary airflow and tone, while allowing the engine pulse to easily move through the muffler, creating a recurrent scavenging effect on the combustion chamber. Suddenly, he was structuring his mufflers differently to any design that had existed before.

Bound up in his product development was a thought-altering conversation with a vendor that led him to invent a design that offered a high degree of manufacturability.

According to Flugger “I could feel it in my bones that I finally had the engineering concept right! I knew that I needed to perfect it, and that’s what we did over the next ten years!”

While Flugger’s thoughts were rooted in creating a design for the track, working out the engineering specifics of his basic design was still not a done deal. He spent several years and a lot of shoe leather working with racers at drag strips and racetracks all over the country, perfecting his ideas and the engineering. He developed the balancing chamber, the Power Chamber ™ and helped with the development of other facets of exhaust including header length and configuration for several major race teams.

What followed were more years of dyno testing, developing theories into hard science, working on velocity improvements inside the muffler and coming to understand actually what was happening inside the muffler when it was developing peak torque and velocity.

Improving torque became the omnipresent challenge and the first Flowmaster race mufflers delivered the goods like no muffler had ever done before.

He tested on circle track cars, drag racers and at Sebring with Jack Roush. Ray would visit these tracks selling mufflers and working with teams on developments. He would tote his muffler along fitted with a handle from a suitcase, for ease of transportation and demonstration. These became known as Flugger’s Suitcase Mufflers.™

Flugger’s Suitcase Mufflers™ soon gave countless racers the edge they needed and wanted plus the ability to continue racing when mandatory sound regulations were imposed on many small circle tracks across the country. Their square-case design allowed easy fitment under low racecars and easily adapted to open-header configurations of circle track cars where sound control and power went hand-in-hand.

To this day, so many racers owe their wins to the edge that Flugger’s chambered mufflers gave them. When Mr. Flugger visits events and tracks today, he is swamped by racers who just want to shake his hand and thank him for the mufflers that helped them win and stay in racing for the past twenty plus years.

To celebrate those victories, Ray Flugger has decided to build a special stainless Signature Edition,Classic Two-Chamber™ Muffler, which is limited to 1,000 units. Each muffler has been personally etch-autographed, and numbered by him.