On the Buick website I frequent, trap speed is everything for tuning.
Claims are: more horsepower = more trap speed
Doesn’t necessarily mean better ET though. Traction, sixty foot, shift rpms, and converter slippage are big factors. The tuning mods I’ve been making are to add trap speed then find the traction later.
I’ve been as fast as 115 mph with stock unopened motor, stock turbo and stock Intercooler. (ET was 12.61)
yeah ill 2nd that…
traps a hp thing… et’s a driver error/tire/blablabla…
when greengtp was running 13.8@99 in the gtp 2 yrs ago… and i was running 13.8@102ish…
on the street we would be side by side till 3rd gear and id pull a car… in my old 91pgt…
and we was still in the quarter… like a quick burst of speed but no n2o…
heheh
oh and that ls1 driver is a faggit… :kekegay: after i ran him [2 yrs ago] in his newl purchased lt1… i smoked him badly… he came back and wouldn t speak… and told his ONE friend that he didn t lose! lol…
so i iasked if he wanted to run them again and he floored it… looked forward and BAM!! right into a PARKED CAR!! hahahhaha 
so the car was totalled
u can’t say that trap is all hp because the laws of physics say that if you add traction (acceleration) your speed decreases as time also decreases…but if you lose traction your speed will increase as well as et…ex:
last year on the same night i went 13.9@99 and 14.2@102
if you’re getting there QUICKER you have less time to get up to speed because you’re off the line farther at the same speed than if you had traction problems…if you pull a 1.3 60’ you’re slingshotting yourself past the 60 foot at a much less speed than if you pulled a 2.6 60’ with the same amount of power. this is really hard to explain i was trying to find an example of something to show this but i keep coming back to slingshotting a ball as aposed to rolling it down a hill, the slingshot can get to the end quicker at a much lower speed because it’s not doing as much work…where as the ball rolling down the hill has to build up momentum on its own, it may be getting there a lot later but it’s gonna be traveling a lot faster.
Let’s use an example of a stick-shift mini-pickup that on a perfect run, gets a timeslip of 19.50 seconds at 70.00 mph in the quarter.
Imagine that the light turns green, the truck moves two feet and the engine dies for three seconds. After restarting the engine, the driver proceeds to then complete a perfect pass. His time slip would show 22.50 seconds at 69.97 mph. The ET was 3.00 seconds high but the speed was almost unaffected… why?? It’s because his racetrack was 1318 feet long instead of 1320, and in those last two feet this truck usually gains an additional 0.03 mph. However, the clocks recorded the long time. My point? Much of a great ET is made by a great launch.
Now take this truck again, and the driver leaves right on the green light. However, he misses the 3-4 shift when he’s at 1250 feet. He coasts for the last 70 feet while trying to find fourth gear. Now instead of accelerating another few mph in this final 70 feet of the track, he decelerates over this distance. His timeslip; 19.51 at 67.83 mph. Note how the et is almost perfect (only off by 0.01 second) but the trap speed is way off (over 2 mph slow)! On a good run, traveling that last 70 feet at an average of 69 mph, would have taken .692 seconds. At a 68 mph avg., that 70 feet takes .682 seconds. That’s why his ET only varied by .01 seconds, yet the trap speed was ‘way off’. My point here: the end of the track is critical to trap speed; shift rpm, missing a gear… these are the big players.
this sort of explains things…notice how speed goes up as traction goes down
truee…