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NHRA Webisode 4

Tony Schumacher and his Racing Team explain what they do to keep the team winning.

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NHRA Webisode 4

Tony Schumacher and his Racing Team explain what they do to keep the team winning.

Our U.S. Army top fuel dragster, is very powerful, powerful enough to go from zero to 100 mph in less than one second, and achieve speeds at over 330 mph. There's a lot of things involved in doing that, and one of the things is the type of fuel we use, nitro methane. Just as the U.S. Army uses state of the art technology and equipment.
We use the most top of the line equipment and fuel to help make the U.S. Army top fuel car the fastest out on the track. Let's take a look at how we mix the fuel that goes in the racecar. We receive a drum of nitro methane from our supplier that is a 90%, which is the maximum amount we can run in our race car. And then we mix it with methanol to the specific percentage that we want to run in our racecar for that particular run. And then, we put it in these five gallon jugs. We have a device that measures the specific gravity of the fuel, at a certain temperature. And we check it with that, and make sure it is exactly what we want.
Then we take the jugs and pour them into the racecar. And we will vary that for each run, the exact percentage we want to run for that particular run of the racecar. During a run, our cars, we do a burn out and back up and do a normal run. And normally that will burn about twelve gallons of nitro during that time. The cost of our nitro, it varies, like gasoline prices vary, but somewhere in between twenty to twenty five dollars per gallon. So it uses a pretty good amount of fuel for one run down the racetrack.
If we ran our same engine on gasoline, it would maybe make 1200 to 1500 horsepower. We switch it over to nitro methane that engine can make seven or eight thousand horsepower, so the fuel really is the driving force in the power that we make in our engine. The fuel mixture is just one of the things that works together to add the power to the U.S. Army top fuel dragster. Just as the U.S. Army Soldier has a strength like no other, U.S. Army Top Fuel team has a powerful dragster like no other.
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