![]() ![]() “I was inspired by that interview with Don, but what really stuck out to me was that he said he didn’t think 200 mph was possible with the technology that was currently available at that time. “I’m not really an electric car guy - I love internal combustion engines - but ICE tech has fundamentally stayed the same for more than a century.” Huff told MotorLife. The topic? The race to do the same in an electric dragster. In 2016, veteran racer Steve Huff saw an interview on TV with earlier legend Don Garlits, who was the first racer to hit 200 MPH in a Top Fuel car back in the 1960s (today’s Top Fuel dragsters are going over 300). That’s why racing gear companies have been working behind the scenes with racing teams to get electric vehicle technology onto the track. ![]() If you’re a fan of EVs, you’ve probably been thinking to yourself, “Hey, this is an ideal job for EVs! They have lots of torque!” And, you’re definitely right. The primal sound, the fastest accelerating cars on the planet, and everything else about the race is truly a spectacle of racing, automotive engineering, and a show that impresses our inner caveman, whether the car makes it to the end of the track, goes up in flames, violently explodes, or goes airborne and disintegrates from all of the force. They’re that insane.Įven the exhaust pipes push out so much exhaust that they themselves push the car down and forward just from the pressure of those escaping gases.įor fans, it’s a sight to behold. And, that’s assuming they don’t blow up during their run, because the best racers are always at the edge of exploding. ![]() After every race, the whole engine needs to be overhauled. As they speed up (reaching 100 MPH in 0.8 seconds), the tires expand again and give the vehicle a more favorable gear ratio for speed. When they take off, they produce so much torque that they twist the tires into a smaller overall diameter from hub to tread, temporarily giving the vehicle a lower gear ratio and a much larger contact patch. They otherwise tend to use relatively primitive pushrod, two-valve engine technology, but still make insane levels of power using a supercharger. They often have no liquid cooling systems (something some EVs sort of get away with, but that’s very rare in today’s combustion vehicles), a sacrifice made for strength and rigidity. They’re powered by the most potent of alcohol-nitromethane fuels, and this potent mixture gets burnt by engines that are built from the ground up to perform amazingly for only a few seconds (they’d melt down if run for more than ten seconds). ![]() Some add a normal car body on top to look like a car, while the most extreme machines make no pretenses of being anything but a custom rig that prioritizes acceleration above everything.Įverything about Top Fuel dragsters is a caricature of automotive technology, and then a caricature of that. While most normal drag racing cars start their life as a factory car of some kind and then duke it out against the competition for quarters and eighths of miles, the most wild drag racing machines are custom built. A few weeks ago, Holley’s MotorLife blog covered an electric vehicle doing something we typically associate with combustion: dragsters. ![]()
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