NITROUS ROUNDTABLE
smaller. It softens the impact on the car as we apply a system, but it also
makes it a lot more manageable. That’s led into, say, the MSD Power Grid,
where we have infinite timing management. The EFI has pushed these
cars a long ways.
Back to your previous question about technology, I guess EFI was some-
thing I left off because EFI gives us an immense amount of tunability
and control over the power management side of it. The FT Spark on the
FuelTech side, it does all of the same things that the Power Grid does. We
may put 30 or as many as 50 different timing points on the screen for an
individual run. That stuff wasn’t there 10-12 years ago. At the same time,
we’re dividing that up among six or seven nitrous systems. The more systems
you do, the more tunable each of those systems are for power management.
PM: I hate to repeat myself, but the fuel injection was the first major
change. I got there maybe 10 years earlier in the Pro Street deal and I saw
the potential, so I jumped into Pro Mod with it. We were the first EFI car
to win an NHRA Pro Mod race at Norwalk in 2010. We basically made it
so everyone had to put it on. You just couldn’t run with us. Once you get
somebody on the program and give them a good tuneup and give them
something to work with, they never go back. I don’t know if you can buy
a weed eater with a carburetor anymore. I was lucky to get with it early
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and stick with it.
After that, it would be all the power management. There’s so many things
that we’ve evolved in our ECU: controls and different things. Right now,
with our EFI Technology R8 we can shift the car, lock the converter up,
move shocks. We don’t have any digisets in the car anymore. Everything is
controlled in the ECU and that’s a major deal because everything happens
off of the event. When you let go of the transbrake or let go of the clutch,
it begins everything. Everything is timed off of that and it’s timed with the
engine, so it’s pretty neat.
BS: I would say some of the biggest changes were in shock technology
and just the racers and tuners getting sharper on power management and
how to keep the tire happy. You start fixing certain spots and other windows
open up and you can start doing things that you would not have thought
possible before because you have the things ahead of that correct now, if that
makes sense. Before, you’d be like, “man, I can’t do that because I can’t get
away with this.” Well, that’s right, but that’s because of this one thing just
before that that’s really, really wrong. You
fix that one little thing that doesn’t seem so
big, now all of the sudden the possibilities
are a whole lot greater than you would’ve
BRANDON SWITZER
ever imagined.
It’s just been power management. Instead
of just hitting everything with a sledge ham-
mer, people have gotten a lot smarter on
doing things smoother and more calculated.
It’s the level that the tuners are looking at
data and paying attention to it and working
on all of the little things. Heck, 10 years ago
you just had three or four systems to turn on
by timers and you had static timing of 30
degrees and then you had step retards. We
just use so many more infinitely adjustable
tools to achieve the same thing in a much
more controlled fashion now. Things are not
square waves anymore; they’re curves that
you build and things of that sort. Everything
is just a lot more polished.
SJ: Well, it used to be the thought process
was a nitrous car could run good to the 330,
then after that you’re coasting along. One
thing that’s changed in the last two years is
we have developed real power. At its heart,
a nitrous engine just makes torque, right?
It doesn’t make a lot of horsepower. Well,
we’ve figured out how to make these things
make power up top, too. I remember it took
me two years Pro Nitrous racing to go 200
mph in the eighth mile. That was a huge accomplishment for me, with an
automatic, to run 200 mph. Now these guys are going 209. That’s power.
The engines are the same size as they were then. That’s refining what they
have. Not only is everyone running better up front, it used to be you’d never
see a .930 60-foot. Now you see .920s, nine-teens, probably. But now you
see these things running 1.18 and 1.19 out the back. They’re gettin’ it, man.
They’ve got a good product.
Fuel injection is another big change. We run Holley EFI and a Power
Grid, but however they do it, everyone is becoming much more refined in
power application. Drag racing at its heart is all power application. The
smoother you can bring in power, the faster it is. That’s kind of the bread
and butter of Pro Nitrous, I think, as well.
The drama and excitement of a nitrous car – the nitrous purges and big
header flames – is a show and a major reason why they’re appealing to
fans. But what happened to bullhorns? Will we ever see them come back?
Are the zoomies really better?
JC: (Laughs) Man, we did some testing with them this winter and to
Issue 144
a guy who runs .65s and .66s, you only have so many of those passes that
you can make. I don’t care who you are or how smart you are, you can only
make so many of those .64-.65 runs before the motor is tired and gives up.
To me, the way I run my car is sort of like a chess game. I look at who
I gotta run, what they have the potential to run and I kinda tune around
that. I don’t ever want to leave anything on the table, but if I’m running
Tommy Franklin, Lizzy or Jim Halsey, I’m swinging for it. We got a rack of
pistons sitting on the table over there. I got this thing tuned up and we’re
going after it. But if I’m running somebody and I’ve got three or four hun-
dredths on ‘em, I tend to back off this thing a little bit out the back just to
save the parts. That’s my kinda mindset or how I like to race these things.
CB: We went to more and more systems. It used to be you would run
two systems, three systems, four systems. Then we’d have four systems
with a spray bar down the middle of the manifold. Now we run five, six
and seven systems depending on how we run it. It’s not that those systems
are any larger than that four systems was. Each of the systems is typically