blueliner

the special fuel helps, nitro alcohol somthing or other.

Mopar68

I believe it's Nitro Methane. You have to remember that these engines were built for just a couple of runs. Realiability isn't the number 1 issue. It is for road cars. It just uses everything in exccess. It has a huge blower to just devour the air, huge injectors to soak the combustion chambers (I've seen the inside of a Top fuelie's combustion chamber at full throttle, and it was like a water hose at full bore), and a huge spark. Don't they have two spark plugs per cylinder?

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Attaus

Yes, they do. The fuel in the combustion chamber is a few psi off of hydraulic lock (so thick that the mixture is almost solid). If the car has turbos, you are pretty much guaranteed that it is pushing 60 psi. It's insane.. oh, and I believe they rebuild the motor after every run. You think that they might get good at it after a while.


I think someone made a thread about it. I didn't read the whole thing, but you should check it out.

Mopar68

Top fuelers don't run turbos. They have those huge blowers on top. That's kind of perplexing, though. Why not turbos? Maybe they can't have ANY lag. Maybe the turbo would get way too hot and the engine would be sucking in hot air? Who knows.

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"....give it everything you've got cause it'll throw you back more than you could ever imagine." -WP

Attaus

Oh yeah, thats true. I forgot about blowers. I just saw that drag thread and a Dodge HEMI doesn't produce enough power to spool the supercharger. Keep in mind superchargers don't 'spool' they run off the motor. So.. the motor doesn't have enough power to turn it. That's insane.

civckllr

there is a class of dragster that uses turbos and they push 70psi (i think).
BTW- how much psi is = to 1bar

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VR6 Man

I saw somewhere that a blower on a dragster makes over 100 psi. Thats insane.

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Attaus

14 psi = 1 bar

lambo or holden

How many litres are those things.
I don't think the turbos would fit in the exhusts. Or enough time to spool in 4-5 seconds.

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Driftster

Want the reason(What I think the reason is) they don't have turbo's...



Ever watch the exhaust on those things?

Not only would the tubing have to be 100% welded because any coupler would fly off due to pressure..

There couldn't be an intercooler or the core would melt..

And that means the air going in would be rediculously hot...

it'd be a big useless hunk of crap

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SteveFX

Mopar, if you have time to pronouce "lag"; you lost. Better hp solution next time/got another 20/30/50 grand?

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Veyron_253

I love how the huge tires warp right at take off, pretty cool when they show it in slow motion. The rear wing also generates a couple thousand pounds of downforce to keep those weels planted.

S7TT

I read in an article in Motortrend about drag cars that the blower needs at least 900 horses to run. That's just to turn the blower.

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nist7

Right now the NHRA restricts top fuelers to a displacement of 500 cubic inches, or about 8.2L

The reason why they can crank out so much power is because they are only designed to last about 5 seconds. And this means extreme fuel delivery, supercharging, etc.

They use about 4 -5 gallons per 1/4 mile, (excluding burn-out, and idling) so you can see that the mileage is not great. It comes to about 0.05 miles per gallon...

A Veyron's engine is not even powerful enough to begin to turn the supercharger on a top fueler.

One of the most remarkable things about top fuelers is that their engines is converted to a diesel about half-way down the track. Why? Because the insanely high pressure and temperature inside the cylinder actually melts the spark plugs and render them useless. But this is not to worry because at this point so much compression is being made by the pistons that the air-fuel mixture is ignited without the need for a spark.

Oh and another thing: these engine blocks have no coolant passages, which gives them considerable strength.

http://www.bradanderson.com/Parts/98BAE.htm is an engine block supplier for some of the teams in top fuel.