NITROUS ROUNDTABLE
Marcus Birt in his Stevie “Fast” Jackson-tuned, Musi-powered ‘16 Corvette grabbed
the attention of nitrous racing insiders and the casually observant alike when he lit
up the scoreboard with a 3.604-second blast in Radial vs. the World competition at
Sweet 16 2.0. It was the quickest eighth-mile nitrous doorslammer pass of all time,
regardless of tire type. Jackson believes there’s even more left in the combination.
expire a motor once a race. Now, I ain’t saying you won’t get one every now
and then, but you hardly ever expire it. You don’t burn it up. You knock
the rings out of it, but you hardly ever just burn it up or destroy it. A lot of
that is just the quality of the fuel injection. I run this MoTeC from Switzer
and since I’ve put it on here it’s been flawless. There’s no end to what you
can do with it. For me, that’s probably the biggest thing that’s led to the
durability of these motors.
CB: The bore space has helped us. We still have to do quite a bit. We try
not to take the heads off more frequently than we have to and we try not
to hurt anything, but after six to eight runs you’ll have to replace pieces on
them if the weekend goes well. If we’re in really good air and we’re leaning
on stuff, it’ll come apart pretty frequently. But bore space helped them a
lot. When they went to the 5.300 bore space, it gave you more room for
bore and sleeve material and head gasket sealing.
Nitrous technology has come a long way in the last 10 years with how
we run nitrous. Intake manifolds and just the motor itself have evolved
as other people have got involved. And it’s people who come from other
worlds – from Winston Cup, from Pro Stock – because the nitrous motor,
in essence, is still a naturally aspirated motor. It still thinks it’s naturally
aspirated, we just diminish that as we apply systems. The things that make
a naturally aspirated motor live, typically, if we don’t miss the tuneup, make
a nitrous motor live the same. So stepping into some of those other worlds
and getting some of those other people involved has definitely helped the
nitrous combination. It’s helped the motors live and therefore we can
learn more and we can run them a little harder because we get more runs.
BS: The durability is solely in the hands of the person who’s asking the
equipment to do a job. That’s their attention to detail and how disciplined
and thorough they want to be. There aren’t necessarily any parts that’ve
been made better to take more beating or do this or do that. If you’re forced
to run an entire weekend with one engine and you’re a disciplined person,
you learn real quick how to make things last and what you can do and
how many laps you can make at different levels of aggression and things
of that sort. I think that’s probably more just the tuners getting better at
their jobs than anything. It’s not a physical parts deal.
That’s kind of the bad thing about nitrous that gives it that whole rap.
May 2019
It’s real easy – especially now with fuel injection – you can type something
on a keyboard that if you had to physically go out and do that mechanical
change to an engine with carburetors on it, you would stop and think
twice about it because it’s almost not even physically possible. That’s kind
of what I mean by that. Somebody will take the jets out and put bigger
jets in. Well, you equate that to a guy next to you running a blower. Well,
when he opens the cabinet in his trailer and grabs a pulley half the size
of the one he ran the run before, he might stop and think about what he’s
doing a little bit differently.
SJ: Nitrous engines are far better, shoot, just even in the last two years.
Two reasons: one, everybody’s getting a handle on electronic fuel injection.
And going back to your question about the single biggest advancements
in technology, the one thing I left out, of course, is electronic fuel injec-
tion. If we still had carburetors, we would be nowhere near where we are
because you cannot fuel the engine at the engine speed it has to run at
with a carburetor.
But the biggest gains in durability are from manufacturers putting their
heart and soul into their engine programs. You’ve got Pat Musi, Gene Ful-
ton, Charlie Buck, Reher-Morrison and a host of others that are pushing
to make these engines more durable and reliable. I can remember a time
when you put two thou of jet in these things and went and ran it, you had
to put a piston in it. I made eight runs with Marcus Birt’s car, 205 mph on a
radial, and the worst hole leaked 18 percent. That’s pretty, pretty awesome.
Better piston design, better combustion chamber design in the head,
and everyone getting fuel injection figured out, I think, are the biggest
gains in durability. Everybody’s continuously pushing to be better, and
that’s why I love nitrous racing.
How has the approach to running a nitrous car changed over the last
5-10 years?
JC: The biggest thing for me, how I look at running it, if you want to
go out there and run 3.70, you can do that all day long, 20 or 30 passes,
right? If you want to go out there and be a 3.60 player, if you want to be
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