[Jeff Higgins]

They are impressive either way you add it up. Some of the numbers in this latest version do not add up, granted, and there are some other "enhancements" made as well. Still, the real numbers are impressive enough. No need to exagerate with these cars. "Naught to 330" in just over four and one half seconds ain't bad.

I actually had the chance to wrench a little bit on a funny car back in the early '80's, back when they still had the full class deignation of "AA/FC". Strictly "amateur hour", this was a group of knuckleheads off the shop floor that would run one whenever they could pull together enough spare change to make it run. They did manage the track record in Denver one year, but that was their only claim to fame. This was when the NHRA still had enough local yokels running these things to actually give divisional points in the fuel classes. Before it got "expensive", relatively speaking. Back when they sometimes still had 32 car fields at nationals. But I digress...

These cars won't "diesel". They were just starting to run dual mags and dual plugs back then, but for different reasons than we do. It was (still is) for the redundancy; just like an airplane. It's pretty common to lose a plug on a run, and the second one gives it a chance to keep firing on that cylinder. If you lose both plugs, it drops that cylinder. You can actually see when a car does this; the exhaust pipe on that cylinder starts looking like a sprinkler. It just keeps pumping the raw fuel through it.

The part about shutting off fuel flow to cut the engine is kinda sorta true. Problem is, the driver cannot do it. The NHRA does not allow fuel control valves, nor levers to control them, in the cockpit for safety reasons. The motors run on mags and again, there is no driver accesible shut off. A crew member has to shut the car off. In the case of an aborted run, keep your eyes on the guy that walks up and shuts it off. At the end of the run, it just runs out of fuel somewhere in the shutdown area. You will see these cars wreck sometimes and rather inexplicably (seemingly) just keep running. I saw a top fuel car flop on its side after getting crossed up right out of the hole one day; it kept spinning like a top around the rear tire that was on the ground. No way to stop it; the driver just had to wait for it to run out of gas.

These machines are just so over the top they defy belief. They are now running eight gallon tanks on these cars (the guys I hung out with ran five) and they run them dry in one burnout and a single pass. The burnout uses just about a gallon of it. With that in mind, try filling an 7 gallon container in 4.5 seconds. See how many garden hoses running at full blast it takes to do that. That is the fuel flow into a nitro burning motor. The NHRA has now bumped the percent down once again in an effort to somewhat control these cars. I believe it is down to 85% now, with the rest methanol.

Anyway, drag racing as a whole is pretty damn boring. I am, however, and will remain a lifelong fan of top fuel and funny car. If you have never seen one live, go do it. You owe it to yourself. Even if you hate drag racing and everything to do with it. You have my money back guarantee; you will never see anything else like it. TV does it no justice whatsoever.