New Major Sponsor for NHRA Pro's

NHRA has signed a multiyear agreement with Traxxas, the leading manufacturer and seller of high performance radio-controlled vehicles. The agreement designates Traxxas as the Official Radio-Controlled Performance Products of the NHRA and will fully integrate the Traxxas brand into all aspects of NHRA, including extensive multimedia rights, broadcast elements, and a strong on-site presence, including interactive displays, signage, and entertainment features.

The sponsorship includes new Top Fuel and Funny Car specialty race-within-a-race programs, both sponsored by Traxxas. The specifics of the specialty programs, including locations for each event, will be announced at a later date. Traxxas will provide $260,000 to fund the two programs, and the Top Fuel and Funny Car specialty-race winners receiving $100,000 each.

“Traxxas comes to NHRA not only as marketing partners, but as longtime fans of the sport,” said Mike Jenkins, owner and president of Traxxas. “The extreme horsepower, speed, and excitement of NHRA Drag Racing is a great match for the performance we build into our radio-controlled products.”

Fans attending 2012 NHRA Full Throttle Drag Racing Series events will easily see the Traxxas presence throughout each racetrack. An interactive display within Nitro Alley will allow fans the opportunity to test drive one of the many premium radio-control vehicles the company has to offer. In addition, Traxxas will conduct trackside entertainment during the event to showcase the excitement, durability, speed, and maneuverability of its radio-control vehicles. Also, Traxxas signage will be seen on the on-site video screen.

“The program with Traxxas is one of the most comprehensive and extensive official sponsorships in NHRA Drag Racing,” said NHRA President Tom Compton. “As part of this sponsorship, we are very pleased to introduce two new specialty programs for Top Fuel and Funny Car. These two programs, which pair the best of the best in the two top classes, will be extremely popular with the fans and bring added excitement to the race weekend.”

As part of the agreement, Traxxas will have a major role during NHRA Full Throttle Drag Racing Series telecasts on ESPN, including advertising both in the qualifying and eliminations shows, with broadcast enhancements including an in-show sponsor feature and race ticker. Traxxas will maintain a significant presence on NHRA.com and plans to provide outreach to NHRA members with special members-only offers.

Earlier this month, Traxxas announced it will become the primary sponsor for Courtney Force, who will make her debut in the Funny Car class in 2012 in a Traxxas Ford Mustang. The much-anticipated arrival of John Force’s youngest daughter to the Funny Car category will result in one of the more exciting Automobile Club of Southern California Road to the Future Award battles in NHRA history.


The 2012 NHRA Full Throttle Drag Racing Series season kicks off Feb. 9-12 at Auto Club Raceway at Pomona with the 52nd annual O’Reilly Auto Parts NHRA Winternationals presented by Super Start Batteries. 

This is what Antron Brown experiences while he is on the job!

DEFINITION OF ACCELERATION

One top fuel dragster 500 cubic inch Hemi engine makes more horsepower than the first 4 rows of stock cars at the Daytona 500.

It takes just 15/100ths (0.15) of a second for all 6,000+ horsepower (some believe 8,000 HP is more realistic - there are no dynomometers capable of measuring) of an NHRA Top Fuel dragster engine to reach the rear wheels.

Under full throttle, a dragster engine consumes 1-1/2 gallons of nitromethane per second; a fully loaded 747 consumes jet fuel at the same rate with 25% less energy being produced.

A stock Dodge Hemi V8 engine cannot produce enough power to drive the dragster's supercharger.

With 3,000 CFM of air being rammed in by the supercharger on overdrive, the fuel mixture is compressed into a near-solid form before ignition.

Cylinders run on the verge of hydraulic lock at full throttle.

At the stoichiometric (stoichiometry: methodology and technology by which quantities of reactants and products in chemical reactions are determined) 1.7:1 air/fuel mixture of nitromethane, the flame front temperature measures 7,050 deg F (Oxy-acetylene on "cut" is 6,300)

Nitro methane burns yellow. The spectacular white flame seen above the stacks at night is raw burning hydrogen, dissociated from atmospheric water vapor by the searing exhaust gases.

Dual magnetos supply 44 amps to each spark plug. This is the output of an arc welder in each cylinder.

Spark plug electrodes are totally consumed during one pass. After halfway, the engine is dieseling from compression, plus the glow of exhaust valves at 1,400 deg F. The engine can only be shut down by cutting the fuel flow.

If spark momentarily fails early in the run, unburned nitro builds up in the affected cylinders and then explodes with sufficient force to blow cylinder heads off the block in pieces or split the block in half.

In order to exceed 300 mph in 4.5 seconds, dragsters must accelerate an average of over 4G's. In order to reach 200 mph well before half-track, the launch acceleration approaches 8G's.

Dragsters reach over 300 miles per hour before you have completed reading this sentence.

Top fuel engines turn approximately 540 revolutions from light to light! Including the burnout, the engine must only survive 900 revolutions under load.

The redline is actually quite high at 9,500 rpm.

Assuming all the equipment is paid off, the crew worked for free, and for once NOTHING BLOWS UP, each run costs an estimate $1,000.00 per second.

The current top fuel dragster elapsed time record is 4.428 seconds for the quarter mile (11/12/06, Tony Schumacher, at  Pomona  ,  CA  ). The top speed record is 336.15 mph as measured over the last 66' of the run (05/25/05 Tony Schumacher, at  Hebron  ,  OH  ).

Putting all of this into perspective:

You are driving the average $140,000 Lingenfelter 'twin-turbo' powered Corvette Z06. Over a mile up the road, a top fuel dragster is staged and ready to launch down a quarter mile strip as you pass. You have the advantage of a flying start. You run the 'Vette hard up through the gears and blast across the starting line and pass the dragster at an honest 200 mph. The 'tree' goes green for both of you at that instant.

The dragster launches and starts after you. You keep your foot down hard, but you hear an incredibly brutal whine that sears your eardrums and within 3 seconds, the dragster catches and passes you. He beats you to the finish line, a quarter mile away from where you just passed him.

Think about it, from a standing start, the dragster had spotted you 200 mph and not only caught, but nearly blasted you off the road when he passed you within a mere 1,320 foot long race course.

...... and that my friend, is ACCELERATION!

New Generation Corvette on the Way!

Photo: GM

Well, it looks like the C6 will definitely be driving off into the sunset after the 2013 model year. In a recent story on Autoweek, we’ve learned that the time frame for the arrival of the C7 Corvette is slated for the end of 2013, and it will be sold as a 2014 model. Autoweek found a post on Corvette Forum from a dealer who had received a letter from GM laying out their production plans for the Corvette over the next two years. Included in those plans are the 60th Anniversary 427 Corvette Convertible, an abbreviated ordering period for 2013, and some details about the next generation Corvette.

Orders for 2013 C6 Corvettes will only be taken for 9 months because the Bowling Green Plant will be shut down for up to six or seven months to prepare equipment for the production of the new C7 Corvette model. Dealerships that plan to sell a large volume of C6 Corvettes during its last production year are also being advised to stock up so they have enough inventory to carry them through the Bowling Green shut down while they wait for the C7.

Additionally, the letter informs dealers that if they want to have a shot at getting a C7 allocation, they must agree to “invest in special tools and training for the dealership’s personnel” to meet the needs of C7 Corvette buyers.

New Spark Plug Technology in the making.

The Latest in Spark Plug Technology with Pulstar

The spark plug was first developed in 1860 by Etienne Lenoir in his first internal combustion engine, but it wasn’t until the invention of the commercially-viable high voltage spark plug as part of a magneto-style ignition system by engineer Gottlob Honold in 1902 that the development of the internal combustion engine was made possible. Since that time, the basic principle of the spark plug has remained largely the same. Until now, that is.

The folks at Pulstar boast a line of plugs that aren’t your average spark plug. These Pulstar plugs are claimed to be designed to not only deliver additional horsepower and torque, but increase fuel economy as well. To learn more about these radical plugs and how one can best select the proper plugs, we sat down with Pulstar founder and President Lou Camilli, who could be best described as a walking encyclopedia of science and electrical energy knowledge.

Putting the Pulse In Pulstar

So what is the Pulstar Pulse plug, and what makes it so different from other spark plugs on the market, you ask? Interestingly, the Pulstar Pulse plug was created not through the inspiration of the automobile, but of science. The Pulse plug applies technology developed at the Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, known as Pulsed Power Technology, which is used to generate and apply energetic beams and high power energy pulses. And through plasma research supported by the scientists and engineers at Sandia derived from ultra-high power electrodynamics, the technology behind the Pulse Plug was born. The result is a plug that Pulstar boasts as virtual replacement for the age-old spark plug.

The Pulse Plug looks like a standard plug on the outside, but on the inside is a capacitor that stores energy each firing cycle and releases it in a high-energy pulse. In essence, Pulstar has completely redesigned how the 100 year old spark plug operates and claims it has made the combustion process far more efficient.

And while the Pulse Plug may look like your ordinary spark plug on the outside, it’s what inside that matters. With the Pulse Plug, electrical energy from your engine’s ignition coil is stored in a capacitor within the plug, which is released in a powerful and quick two-nanosecond high-energy pulse when needed. They claim these plugs incorporate a current peaking capacitor to increase peak spark power from 50 watts in traditional plugs to over 1,000,000 watts of fuel igniting power.


Behind The Technology
Over the years, many attempts have been made to take the spark plug to a new level, but the basic principle has remained the same for more than 100 years. The traditional plug has an insulator and an air gap, and a spark is created. But as Camilli explains, auto makers have for years worked around the design limits of the spark plug, with cam phasing, direct injection, stratified charge, and other modifications to get the fuel into the spark.

This cutaway diagram displays the differences between the Pulse Plug and a traditional spark plug. Where an air gap resides between the resister and gas seal in a spark plug, the Pulse Plug houses a built-in capacitor.