Today was nearly, a heart beat away, one last fitful display of pride away from being my last day as a lawyer. Others have gone on before, and have done well for themselves. I have a mortgage (two of them actually), and enough children to field a basketball team. The oldest starts college in 3 years, the youngest will be under my roof for another 16. Ringing bells for Salvation Army and filing pro bono appeals for death row inmates ain't in my immediate future.
Then a funny thing happened on the way to the office. Moses wretched down from the heavens and handed me the stone tablets again. Here they are, mostly in there original form, but also with a few updates...
This list, and a better attribution to the original source, can be located here:
1. One Top Fuel dragster's 500 cubic inch Hemi engine makes more horsepower than the first four rows of the Daytona 500.
2. A stock Dodge Hemi V-8 engine cannot produce enough power to drive the dragster's supercharger.
3. With 3000 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.
4. At the stoichiometric 1.7:1 air-fuel mixture for nitromethane, the flame front temperature measures about 7000 degrees Fahrenheit.
5. Nitromethane burns yellow. The spectacular white flame seen above the stacks at night is raw burning hygrogen, seperated from atmoshperic water vapor by the searing heat of the exhaust gasses.
6. Dual magnetos supply 44 amps to each sparkplug. This is the output of an arc welder in each cylinder.
7. Spark plug electros can be totally consumed during a single pass. After half-distance, the engine is dieseling from compression plus the glow of exhaust valves at 1400 degrees Fahrenheit. The engine can only be shut down by cutting the fuel source (or by dropping enough cylinders that the supercharger blows into billions of pieces from the backpressure).
8. If a spark plug fails early in the run, unburned nitro can build up in the affected cylinder and explode with sufficient force to blow the cylinder head off in pieces, or split the cylinder block in half.
9. In order to exceed 300 mph in 4.5 seconds, dragsters must accelerate at an average of more than 4 g's. In order to reach 200 mph before half-distance, the launch acceleration approaches 8 g's.(The Space Shuttle has a launch acceleration of only 3 g's. The shuttle requires 6 seconds to clear the tower, and 8 minutes to reach its top speed of 17,000 miles. A Top Fuel Car essentially launches at 100 mph, reaching top speed by the end of a 4.5 second run). The 8 g claim is disputed by some heretics, who have been banished from the church of Nitromethane. An F-16 fighter takes off at 0.9 g's. A Top Fuel dragster reaches 300 mph before you have completed reading this sentence. (The Space Shuttle, landing in Florida, begins its re-entry over Hawaii. Since the inception of the shuttle program, less than 200 missions have been flown. A Top Fuel dragster typically has a shutdown area of 3/4 of a mile or less. The engine and transmission is completely broken down and rebuilt, test fired, and in the staging lanes in 75 minutes).
10. The exhaust gasses alone are believed to provide as much as 2,000 pounds of downforce during acceleration. When a Top Fueler drops cylinders on one side of the block only, the loss of equilibrium, results in a loss of traction on the block side throwing cylinders. One dropped cylinder wont necessarily prevent a complete pass, but two or more on the same side of the block will almost always cause the rear-end to fish tail and drop out of the groove.
11. The rear wing provides 8,000 pounds of down force. High speed, high defintion cameras reveal the "bowing" of the a Top Fuel dragster frame during acceleration. Structural failure of the frame can send a car airborn, as Cory MacLenathan learned earlier in the 2006 season. Structural failure of the wing can send a Top Fueler into orbit. Even when all the pieces stay on the machine, aerodynamics can still temporarily defeat gravity, with spectacular results.
12. With a redline that can be as high as 9500 rpm, Top Fuel engines turn approximately 540 revolutions from stage to finish light. Including the burnout, the engine only needs to survive 900 revolutions.
13. Assuming all equipment is paid off, the crew worked for free, and nothing breaks, each run costs about $1000 per second. (A single rear Goodyear tire runs $425. Top Fuel cars might get four passes from a set of tires. Last season, the average cost to run a Top Fuel team was $3,000,000).
14. The current Top Fuel dragster elapsed time record is 4.428 set by Tony Shumacher at the conclusion of the 2006 season. The top speed record is 336.15 set by Shumacher in October 2005.
15. Parachutes are used to assist in stopping the Top Fueler. Pulling power and deploying the chutes results in 3-4 "negative" g's. A detached retina caused from the forces of the parachute assisted stop led to the end of the career of Big Daddy Don Garlits.
So sayeth the Gods of Speed. And the choir said... Formerly Living.
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