Definition of Acceleration
Read this slowly and try to comprehend the amount of force produced in just under than 4 seconds!
There are no rockets or airplanes built by any government in the world that can accelerate from a standing start as fast as a Top Fuel Dragster or Funny Car!
Please note that most of this is plagiarized from an email doing the rounds….
Above photo from Mark J Rebilias Photography, we highly recommend you check out his work here: http://markjrebilas.com.
The facts
One top fuel dragster 500 cubic inch Hemi engine makes more horsepower than the first 4 rows of stock cars at the Daytona 500.
It takes just 15/100ths of a second for all 6,000+ horsepower of an NHRA Top Fuel dragster engine to reach the rear wheels.
Under full throttle, a dragster engine consumes 1-1/2 gallons of nitro methane per second; a fully loaded 747 consumes jet fuel at the same rate with 25% less energy being produced.
A stock Dodge Hemi V8 engine cannot produce enough power to drive the dragster’s supercharger.
With 3,000 CFM of air being rammed in by the supercharger on overdrive, the fuel mixture is compressed into a near-solid form before ignition.
Cylinders run on the verge of hydraulic lock at full throttle.
At the stoichiometric (stoichiometry: methodology and technology by which quantities of reactants and products in chemical reactions are determined) 1.7:1 air/fuel mixture of nitro methane, the flame front temperature measures 7,050 deg F.
Nitro methane burns yellow… The spectacular white flame seen above the stacks at night is raw burning hydrogen, dissociated from atmospheric water vapour by the searing exhaust gases.
Dual magnetos supply 44 amps to each spark plug. This is the output of an arc welder in each cylinder.
Spark plug electrodes are totally consumed during a pass. After halfway, the engine is dieseling from compression, plus the glow of exhaust valves at 1,400 deg F. The engine can only be shut down by cutting the fuel flow.
If spark momentarily fails early in the run, unburned nitro builds up in the affected cylinders and then explodes with sufficient force to blow cylinder heads off the block in pieces or split the block in half.
In order to exceed 300 mph in 4. 5 seconds, dragsters must accelerate an average of over 4G’s. In order to reach 200 mph (well before half-track), the launch acceleration approaches 8G’s.
Dragsters reach over 300 miles per hour before you have completed reading this sentence.
Top fuel engines turn approximately 540 revolutions from light to light! Including the burnout, the engine must only survive 900 revolutions under load.
The redline is actually quite high at 9,500 rpm.
Assuming all the equipment is paid off, the crew worked for free, and for once NOTHING BLOWS UP, each run costs an estimate $1,000.00 per second.
The current top fuel dragster elapsed time record is 4.428 seconds for the quarter mile (11/12/06, Tony Schumacher, at Pomona , CA ). The top speed record is 336.15 mph as measured over the last 66′ of the run (05/25/05 Tony Schumacher, at Hebron , OH ).
Putting all of this into perspective:
You are driving the average $140,000 Lingenfelter ‘twin-turbo’ powered Corvette Z06. Over a mile up the road, a top fuel dragster is staged and ready to launch down a quarter mile strip as you pass. You have the advantage of a flying start. You run the ‘Vette hard up through the gears and blast across the starting line and pass the dragster at an honest 200 mph. The ‘tree’ goes green for both of you at that moment.
The dragster launches and starts after you. You keep your foot down hard, but you hear an incredibly brutal whine that sears your eardrums and within 3 seconds, the dragster catches and passes you. He beats you to the finish line, a quarter mile away from where you just passed him.
Think about it, from a standing start, the dragster had spotted you 200 mph and not only caught, but nearly blasted you off the road when he passed you within a mere 1,320 foot long race course.
…… and that my friend, is ACCELERATION!
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Did you believe “Definition Of Acceleration”? (DA)
Wow! Some of these statements sound pretty fantastic! But lemme just think about ‘em for a minute…
There’s two cars per row in the Daytona 500. So the 500 c.i.d. dragster engine (designed to propel the car for just 1320 feet–a quarter mile), briefly makes 6000 horsepower–eight times as much as the 750 horsepower V8 in a NASCAR racer that’s expected to run continuously for 500 miles. Sounds much less amazing to me, when it’s stated that way…
So the dragster’s engine’s 6000 horsepower takes 0.15 seconds to get to the rear wheels? Why so long? What’s it doing for those 150 milliseconds–taking up the slack in the clutch and drive train (and the tires)??? How meaningful is that?
I’m surprised the dragster can shove a gallon and a half of fuel through its engine in just a second. That’s a big volume of gas (well, actually liquid nitro-methane)! But then, fuel efficiency is not a factor at all in a dragster, though it certainly is an important factor in the 747 airliner. And the truth is that a 747 generates approximately 60,000 horsepower for cruising (and about twice that for takeoff)–and the 747 weighs in at about 400,000 pounds–that’s as much as a whole bunch of dragsters. And that means that, even at cruising, the 747 is continuously generating ten times the amount of power that the dragster’s engine makes during the car’s brief “takeoff” from the line–not “25% less”, like the “Definition” says!!!
(OF COURSE the dragster can accelerate much faster than the 747. The dragster is mechanically connected to the solid track surface through a pair of very wide, very high-friction drag slicks, directly driven through a solid connection from the engine through the rear end. The 747, on the other hand, has engines that only amount to very large fans, that have to blow a soft, compressible fluid [gaseous] medium [the air] back behind the airplane in order to accelerate. Using this kind of propulsion, it will take a lot longer to get the 747 up to 300 m.p.h.–but, of course, it’s not done at that speed–it can go twice as fast, and for a very long time.)
So clearly, we’re comparing apples and kumquats here…
In the “Definition”, I can read the sentence “Dragsters reach over 300 miles per hour before you have completed reading this sentence” in 1.5 to 1.8 seconds (I timed it several times.) If I have to read it out loud–that is, actually say and pronounce the words–I can do it in a little over two seconds–but that’s talking like an auctioneer! If I had to say it like a radio announcer would, then it would take approximately the same amount of time it takes a fuel dragster to reach 300 mph (about 4.5 seconds). But anybody whose been reading for a few years can read it (without having to actually SAY it) much faster than that.
At 200 mph, that Z06 Corvette mentioned in the “Definition” is covering 293.3333 feet per second when it reaches the dragstrip’s Start line. Even if it doesn’t accelerate so much as another tenth of a mile per hour (let’s assume it absolutely cannot go even a tiny bit faster…), then cruising along at the steady speed of just 200 mph, in 4.5 seconds the Corvette will cover 1319.9998 feet. Meanwhile, in that same 4.5 seconds. the dragster will cover the full quarter mile–that’s 1320 feet. That means that at the finish line, the dragster will be ahead by .0002 feet, or less than two and a half thousandths of an inch!!! The suggestion that that would amount to “nearly blasting [you] off the road” is ludicrous, and shows how easy it is for people to bend numbers to make unsuspecting readers think something is much more significant than it really is. Besides, I’ve seen films showing the Z06 (and its speedometer) reaching 320 km/h on the Autobahn, and that converts to 206 mph. If the Corvette got to just 201 mph (average), it would beat the dragster by 6.6 feet at the end of the dragstrip–which comes a lot closer to the definition of “blasting you off the road”!
There are some interesting “facts” in the “Definition of Acceleration”–if indeed they actually are facts. But it’s clear that many of the statements are gross exaggerations and significant overstatements (and at least some are simply factually false). Without thinking, you can choose to believe such statements without questioning them, and feel amazed. But if you give it some thought, ask yourself a few questions, and do the smallest amount of fact checking, claims like these quickly fall apart. Sure, a top fuel dragster is an amazing machine, and very different from the cars that we are all familiar with. But it’s just too easy to grossly exaggerate, and completely mislead the people that don’t bother to apply a little critical thinking to decide what’s actually real and what is not. That’s why religions are so successful!
Vincent Andrunas