My money is on no. 8.
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.
“Alcohol is for drinking, gas is for cleaning parts, and nitro is for racing!”
-Don Garlits
“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?
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.
Nice post...thanks!
“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.”
He shoulda used Clark’s special lubricant, as used on the snow saucer in Christmas Vacation!!
BTW, great article!! Thanks much! Love watching these beasts!
Dragster rail cars .... slingshots ... the epitomy of mechanical engineering ... the scent of the fuel ... the roar of the engine as it heats up the rear tires ... the rush to the finish line ... the adulation of those who do finish and the awe-inspiring survivability of those who, for some reason, don’t finish.
Garlits in black; Muldowney in pink; the next generation and their ‘colors’.
THIS ... IS ... DRAG ... RACING!!
(bow to sparta)
My money is on no. 8.
And the Best of the Best in my humble opinion, Big Daddy Don Garlits, and his "Swamp Rat(s,)" he actually gave one to The Smithsonian museum in Washington, DC. Personally I think he was nut's for doing that, but hey, that's just me, and I'm a nobody, anyhow.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Garlits
In 1970, Garlits was driving Swamp Rat XIII, also called the Wynnscharger, a front-engined slingshot rail, when the vehicle suffered a catastrophic failure. The two-speed transmission Garlits was developing exploded and took a piece out of Garlits' right foot;
It was this/that event, that all {Dragster} builders, started to put engine's in the back/rear of Dragsters!
Unquestionably this fan will always remember Raymond Beadle and the Blue Max, and the interview he gave Playboy magazine, a big buildup to get ready for a run, and at the end of the interview something like "you ask yourself just what the f*!k (Hockey Puck) am I'm doing sitting here (in the driver's seat)."
PRICELESS
How do you clean a toilet with a sword?
Acceleration of five G’s correlates to a rubber to track coefficient of friction of 500%. Some sticky tires.! How is traction maintained on down the track?
Cool? Sure, but can they turn left, in a circle?
I vividly remember the first pair of nitro funny cars I saw go down the track. The sound waves are so strong that you can see them and the fluid in your eyes moves with the waves. Every sense but taste is effected if you are close to the track.