I thought you guys might enjoy this!
Under full throttle, a dragster engine consumes 1.5 gallons of nitro methane per second. Which is the same rate of consumption as a fully loaded 747, but with 4 times the energy density.
The supercharger takes more power to drive than a stock HEMI makes.
With nearly 3000 CFM of air being rammed in by the supercharger on overdrive, the fuel mixture is compressed into a nearly solid form before ignition.
Cylinders run on the verge of hydraulic lock.
Dual magnetos apply 44 amps to each spark plug. This is the output of an arc welder in each cylinder.
At stoichiometric (exact) 1.7:1 air/fuel mixture (for nitro methane), the flame front measures 7050 deg F.
Nitro methane burns yellow. The spectacular white flame seen above the exhaust stacks at night is raw burning hydrogen, dissociated from the atmospheric water vapor by the searing exhaust gasses.
Spark plug electrodes are totally consumed during a pass. After 1/2 track the engine is dieseling from the compression plus the glow of the exhause valves at 1400 deg F. The engine can only be shut down by cutting off it’s fuel supply.
If spark momentarily fails early in the run, unburned nitro builds up in those cylinders and then explodes with a force that can blow the cylinder heads off the block in pieces or blow the block in half.
Dragsters twist the crank (torsionally) so far (20 degrees in the big end of the crank) that sometimes cam lobes are ground offset from front to rear to re-phase the valve timing somewhere closer to syn-chronization with the pistions.
To exceed 300mph in 4.5 seconds, dragsters must accelerate at an average of over 4G’s. But in reaching 200mph well before 1/2 track, the launch acceleration is closer to 8G’s.
If all the equipment is paid off, the crew worked for free, and for once NOTHING BLOWS UP, each run costs $1000 per second.
Dragsters reach over 300mph before you have read this sentence.
Top fuel/Funny Car engines ONLY turn 540 revolutions from light to light.
The redline is actually quite high at 9500rpm.
To give you an idea of the acceleration, the current Top Fuel dragster ET record is 4.477 seconds for the 1/4 mile. This means that you could be comming across the starting line in your average Lingenfelter powered twin turbo Vette at 200mph (on a FLYING START) and the dragster would beat you to the finish line from a dead stop in the 1/4 mile distance.