chris walrod

We built a one-piece full carbon fiber body shell for Alan Johnson's Celica campaign in 2001. We learned quite a bit building those funny cars.
Their particular car used a 20 gallon fuel cell which can be sucked dry if staging games were experienced. Two 75gallon/minute fuel pumps are used to supply the engine with two 1.5" fuel lines.

Each pass wears off .100" of material thickness of each clutch plate.

Rods and pistons are changed after each pass primarily to allow them to cool (only 75 minutes between rounds).

Tire shake will pound the main bearings flat.

Each funny car body generates over 12,000 (twelve K) pounds of downforce.

The launch is about a 3 on the richter scale.

...all this and the engine is held into the chassis with two hose clamps...

dnitake

Ooops, so that's what the M stands for in RPM :-). Thanks for setting me straight.
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9500 Revolutions per minute = 158.33 Revolutions per Second.
A 4.441 second pass would be 703 revolutions, assuming instant acceleration to redline and letting the clutches do all the work. I don't feel like doing the math and I don't know the initial rpm or the engine acceleration, but 540 is probably about right.

LTCMontana

One of the funniest articles I ever read in Car & Driver was several years back on Tony Pendregon's Top Fueler.
A few notes I recall from the article:

1) Set seven 1 gallon buckets of water up and start kicking them over as fast as you can. The car will burn it faster.
2) The drag shoot puts so much force on the car it literlly shuts the engine off because the fuel is forced back toward the tank.
3) As for the SC, he said, "It's kind of like using a clamore mine to flush a toliet. It gets the job done but it's really hard on the toilet."

AlpharettaRK

I'm not a drag race fan either, but it is cool to go to a race because you can wander in the pits and watch guys rebuild the engines in an hour. They wear gloves when doing the tear down because the engines are still really hot.