Off to the Races: NHRA Joliet

Last Saturday Doug and I went up to Joliet to watch the Torco Racing Fuels Route 66 NHRA Nationals drag racing. Cat picked up the majority sponsorship of one of the Top Fuel teams this year and so we had discount tickets to go watch 'Hot Rod' Fuller drive Big Yellow on the 'home' track.

We had a blast. We went up on Saturday, which was the second of two qualifying days for the pros getting ready for the elimination brackets on Sunday and the finals for some of the other classes that were racing that weekend, so we saw a lot of cars. One of the things I enjoyed the most though was the spectacle of the pit area out back of the track and watching the work being done to the cars. Here's a panoramic of the pit area with vendors in the foreground, Top Fuel Dragsters are in the back section on the right (see the Caterpillar trailer?) and Funny Cars straight ahead. To the left is row after row of other classes of cars and motorcycles; Pro Stock, Sportsman Series, Couch Potato ...

This was taken looking over the back of the grandstands in the morning before the biggest crowds hit. The pits are totally open in NHRA and so in addition to numerous vendors and promotions and other activities you can watch nearly everything that gets done to the cars themselves between runs.

We watched quite a bit from here - the Cat pits. Now, isn't this a nice looking car?

Things are kind of quiet at this point; just getting ready for the first run of the day.

Okay, here's some stats. The Top Fuel cars like the Cat car above cover the quarter mile in about 4.5 seconds and are traveling over 320 mph when they get there. From a standing start. Their engines are supercharged 500 cubic inch big blocks with hemispherical heads that burn an explosive called nitromethane and pump out more than 8,000 horsepower. And lots and lots of noise. The fuel pumps ram 100 gallons per minute of go-juice into the beast and the driver has to keep the wheels heading straight down the track while accelerating at over 5.7 g's. Notice the intake and supercharger on the right side of the picture above? That piece of hardware forces air into the engine at over 50 psi and requires more than 500 horsepower to turn at full boost. In case you don't know, that's a lot.

Even if you do know, take a look at this Wikipedia article about Top Fuel cars. Some of the facts about these things are mind-boggling.

We saw the Cat car make it's first qualifying run of the day. The wrinkles in the tires and the flame of the exhaust only hints at the magnitude of the fury unleashed when the light turns green.

The sound at full throttle literally shakes the stadium and resonates through your body cavities. I've never heard anything so loud. Your eyeballs bounce around in their sockets as the cars roar past and then they are gone, blink and you'll miss them.

The Funny Cars were cool too. Basically they've got similar engines, but on a shorter frame with the engine in front of the driver and covered by an enclosed body. It was neat to see some of the biggest names in racing up close, including one of the winningest drivers in the sport, John Force, and his daughter Ashley who had the fastest run in Funny Car the day before. Here she is doing her burnout before her first run of the day.

The only low point of the day was that we got rained out before the Cat car could do its second run. We couldn't wait around to see if the weather would clear, so we headed home. They were able to run later that evening and posted a decent enough time to get into the eliminations on Sunday where they worked their way through the bracket to the final round but lost to Tony Schumacher.

I can't include all of the pictures I took, but I posted the best of them here. Take a look.