I saw this young lady on TV recently, RIP, heart breaking, So much potential and talent, her family must be devastated.
I get it, the sound of the ICE ( British straight 6's might be my weakness ) is almost primal we need it. I hang w/ a couple of old school aircraft ( homebuilt's as well types ) guys and one noted back in the day, a local Detroit guy built a 200 mph electric rail type dragster. It made no noise, they accomplished it, and it was done. Heck, we have people tweaking Tesla's or using their motors and other battery packs and sticking them in lighter cars for constant 9 sec 1/4 mile cars. Throw that power package in a rail what times would you have? What times with further advances? Will the NHRA allow it? Or, like you kind of hinted with the Jet rails in the 60's kinda quash it.
National Air Racing sanctioning body did the same thing to protect the War Bird modifiers in the Unlimited Class. They instituted a minimum empty weight to keep some upstart teams / designers who had on the boards and built and even test flew some lighter and smaller racers to take the big boys on. Not that they were on the cusp of being competitive, but they nipped them in the bud, one being a push-pull twin rotary powered ship that I think pushed the flight envelope up in too the 300's before they were outlawed.
Kind of what like McCain, Schumer and all the other Deep Stater's w/ the help of Louis Lerner did to the Tea Party's...
People will try anything. I was at the Bakersfield Fuel and Gas Championships back in the late 60’s and witnessed a real genius at work. The stock class tear down was being done and a few of the cars were being DQ’d there right after trunk checks.
Of course, the idea of adding weight to cars in the rear end to aid in traction is not a new one. In stockers, it is perfectly legal to have a spare tire, one even chained down to hold it. But what was happening is that some of the owners were filling the tires with cement causing it to be heavy. A few got caught. So the inspecters started hitting valve stems to see if there was any air in them. That worked fine until they hit one on a tire that had been pumped full of water under pressure. It made the tire super heavy. It also got an official knocked out of the trunk when the release shot out of the tire and the stem disintegrated. Besides pissing off a few race officials, he didn’t get to run that time.
rwood