I did two seasons on the Sainty Speedworks top-fuel team as a mechanic.
They were the only team on the roster to run a 3-valve cylinder head (Everyone else was running 2-valve Keith Black heads.
Stan Sainty CNC machined his own engines - blocks, cranks, heads, the lot.
We would dismantle and rebuild the engine almost every run - on short tracks or shake-down passes we would change only valve springs, cylinder rings and bearings as well as all the gaskets, but on a full power 4.01 -ish run, we would dismantle and rebuild the whole engine.
At wide-open throttle the engine will use 65-80 gallons per minute of Nitromethane. That’s two 44 gallon drums per minute.
The joy of running Nitro is that one of it's byproducts of burning is oxygen, so the more you run, the leaner the mixture can get - you are riding a knife edge between a rich enough mixture to make power, and going hydraulic and launching a cylinder head into the crowd. A single wheelspin at half track can unload the engine enough for it to run horribly rich and make it explode.. looks cool, makes a lot of work, and it's real safe.
Those tyres are supposed to crinkle like that - Top Fuellers have no suspension, so the tyre is it - and at launch, you need GRIP, and those things will hold on, and make the car squat hard until they suddenly snap back and launch the car forward - they actually grow by 30-50% in height during the run - acting as a kind of gear ratio change - allowing the car to reach even faster speeds.
Those fuckers are loud, smelly, hot and dear god they are fast.
0-300MPH in 3 1/2 seconds.
RIP Stan, you were one hell of an engineer and a great bloke.
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