Posted on 12/10/2014 5:09:39 PM PST by West Texas Chuck
Awesome quote from John Phillips column in January 2015 Car and Driver.
OF WHITE MICE AND RABID KANGAROOS
"In 1991, I wrote about a Top Fuel dragster that was homing in on the NHRA's first 300-mph quarter-mile pass, a velocity that many felt might teleport the driver so far into the future that he'd land in an era when Congress couldn't pass bills. The car's crew chief was Lee Beard, now 61. In the intervening 24 years, Beard has crewed for everyone from Kenny Bernstein to Whit Bazemore to Steve Torrence.
Anyway, when I asked Beard in '91 to approximate how much power a Top Fuel engine might make, he whipped out a computer simulation. The answer: 4221 pound-feet of torque and 5465 horsepower. "Building an engine like that," Beard added, "it's like plunging your toilet with a Claymore mine. It will probably work, but it's hard on the toilet." He later told me that a Top Fuel engine, in a 3.77 second pass, consumes 5.2 gallons of fuel with a fuel line whose internal diameter is 3.0 inches, delivering Beijing-sourced nitromethane at 83-87 gallons per minutes at 600 psi - which would surely be enough to knock Santa Claus clean off a Macy's float.
After I drove home from this year's 10Best testing, I talked to Beard again because he'd calculated more-recent figures. A 334-mph pass by Doug Kalitta in 2003, for instance, suggested an output of 8000 horsepower. Then Beard and two friends, Patrick Hale and Phil Burgess, collected RacePak data from Torrence's 2013 dragster. No dyno can handle a 496-CID supercharged Top Fuel engine, and it would have to be a fast pull anyhow, given the engine's mayfly lifespan. So Beard simply loaded a silo of digits into a salad shooter.
For starters, he learned that when Torrence hit the throttle, the engine revved to 8700 rpm in half a second, and the rear tires began serving up 4.0 g's of acceleration. At 2.5 seconds into the run, revs fell to 7075 rpm but g's climbed to 4.8. Dragsters have all manner of gastrointestinal organs hanging in the airstream, giving them a dirty Cd of roughly 0.70. At 300 mph, in fact, Torrence's dragster faces 2880 pounds of drag - 560 pounds more than the car, with driver, weighs - meaning that the engine has to produce 2304 horsepower just to shove the air out of the way. Then there's downforce from the wings - 5661 pounds' worth at 300 mph - meaning that the tires are supporting 7981 total pounds, although that figure climbs to 9885 pounds during a 329-mph pass. With so much downforce, 387 horses are required just to keep the dragster rolling forward. Frictional losses in the final drive's ring-and-pinion, along with rotational losses from engine parts and axles and such, well, that requires another 577 horsepower.
Beard used up a lot legal tablets and possibly applied the algorithms necessary to play three-dimensional chess, but he eventually deduced that Torrence's engine was producing 9430 horsepower at 7200 rpm. Of course, that was for a "lazy" 3.775-second pass. So he ran the numbers for Antron Brown's record 3.701 ET. Brown's pass would have required 10,100 horsepower when his car was 2.5 seconds into the run, pulling 5.1 g's. For any given motive event, as much as half a Top Fueler's energy may be turned into heat, which is something you could also say about a small Icelandic volcano.
Ten thousand one hundred horsepower is 20 times what a Chevy Camaro Z/28's engine produces. In fact, each of the Top Fueler's cylinders can supply 1263 horsepower, or 2.5 times what all eight produce in the Z/28. But the point, of course, is this: Torrence's dragster can achieve 60 mph in 0.54 second and 100 mph in 1.04 seconds. A Z/28 can't do that.
Beard is a cagey character, with steel-braided veins and few nose hairs, most of them lost to nitro fumes, and he spends months inventing colorful new translations of the rulebook. In 1989, he was the first to fiddle with traction control, but three wins into the season were sufficient for the NHRA to ask him to cease. Then he got into GPS, saying: "My decisions about clutch and fuel events are based on increments of time into a run. I know when they happen but not precisely where. Where is something I should know." Nowadays, he's the NHRA's Top Fuel and Funny Car technical consultant, so he's dialed back on all the Mad Scientism. For now.
If you could ask the late Sam Peckinpah to invent a form of motorsports, he'd have come up with Top Fuel racing. It so perfectly reflects America's predilections - four seconds of barely controlled violence, then a longish pause, very much like pro football.
Or, as a California marketing guy told me: "Top Fuel cars are to passenger cars what kangaroos are to white mice. They're related, but it was a long time ago. And those kangaroos hop and jump down the track, and occasionally one just up and kicks your face in."
I'm not sure what that means. But I do know that in Peckinpah's version, the kangaroo's would have been rabid. Also armed."
A lot of words, I know, but pretty neat stuff if you love the drags.
Carry on and breathe nitro.
Two things...
Note how many of these ancient drag race guys are still around...makes me wonder how really toxic the stuff is that EPA is always bed wetting over.
Second...Don Schumacher has a facility (electric driven) in my town where they develop the blowers. When they crank that baby up the lights dim everywhere...
A hundred miles an hour in one second.
Better not have to pee before you step on the gas pedal.
There’s a very old bit about just how powerful Top Fuel cars are, that points out that the blower is so stiff, it requires more horsepower to turn than a NASCAR engine produces, so an electric motor strong enough to turn one would put quite a load on the neighborhood power grid.
Fuel cars are the only thing I’ve witnessed where you can feel the organs inside your body vibrating from the sound power. It’s amazing.
“Alcohol is for drinking, gas is for cleaning parts, and nitro is for racing!”
-Don Garlits
7200RPM is 120 crank revolutions per second.
Assuming that the RPMs are 7200 RPM for the entire run (which isn’t actually the case), the crank only turns 444 times for the entire 3.701s pass.
That is truly astounding, if you think about it.
And since it is starting at something less than 7200RPM, and will dip at points in the run, it actually turns out to be less than that.
Someone else commented that the blowers take more power than a nascar motor can produce, which is what, around 650hp nowadays?
That is 650*746=484900 Watts, or 485KW.
What’s even more interesting is that turbochargers are outlawed in top fuel, tmk. In other words, they could go faster, by reducing some of the parasitic losses caused by pulling the supercharger.
The lag thing is solved for all out racing. You just blow fuel and air into the exhaust, spool the turbos, boost is available immediately, which would further reduce ETs. Such systems used to exist for rally cars, but I think they were outlawed.
I read somewhere recently that Garlits actually showed up to a meet with a bottle of liquid O2. NHRA pretty much shut that down after a single pass. Not sure how true it is, saw it on the net :)
“it’s like plunging your toilet with a Claymore mine.”
I can’t find an image of the guy lighting his fireplace with a flamethrower.
What’s a Claymore? Anything like a Henway?
Yep bout two pounds.
Hmm...well, it’s about a quarter mile from here to the grocery store. Of course, you’d have to go through the drive-up window at 377 mph. You’d want to call ahead.
A Claymore is a type of anti-personnel mine that explodes and throws steel balls in a fairly narrow pattern.
The lag thing is solved for all out racing. You just blow fuel and air into the exhaust, spool the turbos, boost is available immediately
****************************
You might want to look at a 60’s company Turbonique... their turbo’s didn’t run on exhaust but used rocket fuel on the hot side , “normal nitro propanol” or NNP
“Dragsters and Funny Cars are cool.”
I drove a flathead rail in 1950 when I was 12 at 124mph.
In 1954 my partner and I held the SCTA lakes record of 154mph in a flathead roadster.
A device that potentially lethal would be only available to Military or Law enforcement details, I presume.
Nice post...thanks!
Military only. But I am sure that there are some in alphabet agencies who have tried to justify having them to use against civilians.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.