The Science Of Drag Racing Fuels – “We’re talking about enough potential power, placed a foot behind my head, to power an entire suburb of houses with lights and appliances on.”
An Australian company is working from scratch to build the biggest, baddest electric drive ever to be attached to a set of wheels. Top EV Racing aims to violently end the dominance of fire-breathing top fuel cars on the drag strip and break world records for acceleration and speed.
The Science Of Drag Racing Fuels
By now, everyone is aware of the monstrous performance potential of electric powertrains. The first time you step on the gas in the humble passenger Nissan Leaf is a real eye-opener – let alone the sheer power of a Zero SR or Tesla Model S.
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None of them are really designed as high performance machines. The Lightning LS-218 electric superbike is, and the thing accelerates fast enough to scare the hairs out of the toughest scrotum.
Electric is no joke. But there are still heights to climb before the battery can be crowned king over the combustion engine on the racetrack. When the flag drops, the bullshit stops and the results speak for themselves.
The quarter-mile drag strip is one of the purest tests of a vehicle’s performance, and it’s still powered by a combustion engine; specifically, the Top Fuel class.
These giant, mutant, 10,000-horsepower fire-breathers suck more than 20 gallons of nitromethane fuel during a pass. Their ear-splitting, 150-decibel exhaust headers are angled upwards, and they push enough throttle to give the car an extra 1,100 pounds of downforce to help with the near-impossible task of sticking its giant rear tires to drag strip.
Diesel Directionalperformance Racing Industry
Scary doesn’t cover these things. Within 0.8 seconds of launch, they are doing more than 100 mph, and run the quarter mile in 4.5 seconds, reaching 332 mph at the finish line. It’s in Australia, which is the only place that still allows them to run that far. The rest of the world decided a few years ago that top speeds were getting out of hand, and only goes about three-quarters of that distance … keeping the top speed at a much safer 328.8 mph.
These are some of the most extreme machines on the planet, a hair’s breadth from explosive destruction every second, and ultimately these are the Goliaths that will need to be defeated if electrics are to truly take the pure stakes in performance.
Electric drag racing is progressing pretty well, but it’s nowhere near what the Top Fuel guys are doing. According to the National Electric Drag Racing Association, the current quarter-mile record for an electric dragster is 7.274 seconds @ 185 mph, set by the Swamp Rat team in Florida three years ago. That’s crazy fast to you and me, but 2.7 seconds between that and the Top Fuel record is an ocean of time in drag racing.
To cover that distance and consign combustion to the history books, electric drag racing needs to take a giant leap forward—a leap that will require the biggest, baddest, highest-discharge, most powerful electric drivetrain ever to be mated to a set of quiver. Tires.
Why Is It Called ‘top Fuel’?
The West Australian company believes it is almost ready to take on the Top Fuel challenge – and break a number of drag racing, land speed and Guinness World Records along the way.
Top EV Racing is the brainchild of electronics engineer Michael Fragomeni, a long-time drag racing enthusiast who drove a modified 9-second race car at the tender age of 12.
Fragomeni and his team didn’t just have to build a car. Electric motors, inverters and batteries simply cannot produce and handle the enormous power and discharge rates this task requires. So, using premium aerospace alloys, additive manufacturing and generative design, the team has spent the better part of the last seven years working on custom powertrain engineering.
If this car lives up to its potential, it will be a fundamental revolution in the sport of drag racing. Its 1,000-volt, 5,000-odd horsepower motor may not reach the peak power of Top Fuel cars, but it will generate more than 17,000 lb-ft (23,049 Nm) of torque from zero rpm, has more “power punches” per revolution and it has to use its muscles in a much more controlled way than combustion cars.
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The team believes it won’t take long to beat the Top EV cars at their own game, under their own rules, and the Australian National Drag Racing Association (ANDRA) has agreed to allow Top EV cars to race alongside the cars with Top Fuel once sanctioned.
If all goes to plan and they beat the best in the combustion world, things could get really interesting. Freed from the constraints of Top Fuel regulations, the Top EV team wants to embark on a host of other new technologies that could make the car significantly faster and safer.
And while acceleration times are a clear focus here, the team is also aiming for tarmac-based land speed records, with a stated goal of half the speed of sound, or about 612 km/h (380 mph), on an airstrip . These are highly dangerous endeavors, accelerating terrifying amounts of electricity to speeds that test the outer limits of control.
Fragomeni: We are about 12 months away from the debut performance. When we debut the car, we have to license both the car and myself as the driver. We’ll need to finish the burn, show we can launch the car and complete the quarter and a half laps.
Fuel Economy And Aerodynamics: The Yin And Yang Of Car Design
So we’re going to build the car slowly. But hopefully we can set a world record on our first day out and then we have a few more to achieve after that as we continue to strengthen the car and learn the car.
We custom build the entire driveline, you can’t buy this stuff off the shelf, and that’s a great part of what takes time. With premium fuel and like most motorsport racing, you can buy all the engine and driveline parts from suppliers around the world and put them together. But for us it is new technologies, it is a new development.
We are also working towards the commercialization of these technologies. The components are scalable and can be used in other forms of motorsport, including drag racing, but we are also looking forward to exploring other industries and applications.
If it was just a race car, we could build this in the back shed, on a personal budget, and be able to go pretty fast. But then it couldn’t happen again. This is all about building a business so we can support the car, take the race car around Australia and around the world in time and grow into a multi-car team.
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So we have to create a lot of new technologies to be able to create and use the power we need to achieve this.
We’ve just been able to beef up the inverter design and swing a bit more power to the motor. So now we could end up with close to 5,000 horsepower. However, we will not unleash that power immediately.
It will probably take us 6 to 12 months from running on the track to applying that full power because we want to be safe and repeatable and keep the car off the walls. We’re talking about 4,000 plus amps of current, so that’s a significant amount of power. You carefully approach him and study the car as we go. We are committed to finding improvements along the way and implementing them.
We wear two hats really; we race competitively and go there to put on an exciting exhibition. Really big burns and really showing the audience some exciting passes. But we also develop the technologies and improve it through constant research and development.
The Difference Between A Pretty Fast Drag Car And A Top Fuel Drag Car.
We hope to achieve records in drag racing and also land speed. At the drag strip, we want lap time and top speed records for both the quarter mile and the eighth mile. We want a Guinness World Record for the fastest accelerating electric vehicle and the fastest accelerating wheeled vehicle. We also want elapsed land speed times and top speed records.
We would like to do the land speed not only on the quarter mile, but also on asphalt. We’re not really looking to hit the salt. The car is designed for an awful lot of launch energy. We really like the traction, so we’d like to stay on tarmac.
Zero to 200 km/h (124 mph) in 0.8 seconds over the first 20 meters, punching through 7G is the goal and the drag strips are primed with gooey rubber glue. We are able to apply energy and get that launch. When we go to an airstrip, even though it’s asphalt, it doesn’t have that sticky preparation on it. So we won’t be able to achieve the same launch forces on a long runway, instead we’ll have more consistent acceleration off the line and hold it much longer over the measured mile.
Our top speed target is half the speed of sound, 612