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Little wiggle room or bumping at 225 mph and up
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No matter how fast two drag cars go and they do go 300 plus mph, they should go side-by-side. In motorsports; however, all speed guarantees are void. In the NHRA Full Throttle Drag racing Series Top Fuel dragsters and Fuel Funny cars routinely blast down straight lanes that are typically no longer than one half mile with safety nets and sand traps at the end.
Racing side-by-side in NHRA is not like bumping in a NASCAR oval race where cars with scraped sides and crunched fenders often go for pit stops to get tape repairs. Stock cars run on high octane gasoline, fuel cars run on nitromethane. When fuel cars are accelerating to 300 mph and a crash occurs the result is often an explosive event because nitromethane is highly volatile and speeds are high, normally much greater than any stock car lap.
It’s said about nitromethane lore that when an experienced crew member pours a puddle of gasoline and a puddle of nitromethane on asphalt or concrete and tosses a lighted match in the gasoline puddle, the vapors ignite, the fuel burns. When that crew member tosses a match in the nitromethane puddle nothing happens. The match burns out. It’s said too that when a crew member smacks the nitromethane puddle with a hammer the fuel explodes.
James “Puppet” DiTuillio, expert nitromethane motorcycle chassis fabricator, adds his solid knowledge to the characteristics of this fuel.
“Nitro won't light even if you hold a torch on it,” DiTuillio said. “It needs to be pretty much pure to explode with a hammer. I've done it on my anvil with only one drop, but it needs compression to blow up.”
That’s the difference between gasoline and nitromethane in race cars. Both substances are under compression but even one drop of pure ntiromethane is volatile. It’s a big dangerous difference.
So recently when 14-time legendary Funny Car champion John Force’s car was on its way to 300 mph beside Jack Beckman whose car was struggling with smoking tires to get proper traction, something caused a radical turn. Force’s Mustang twisted sideways and crossed the centerline in front of Beckman’s car.
“I was in trouble. I have had cars make turns in my career but never that violently. It went to the right and I took it back to the inside. It tried to go too far and I brought it back. Then it blew the tires off and that shot me across like a rocket,” said Force.
Later Force assumed that about the time of his spin Beckman was thinking he was about to be T-boned and that his eyes had to be wide and big.
“I went out there, our car shook, started spinning (the tires), so I pedaled it,” Beckman said. “It moved over towards the centerline quite a bit. I had my hands full and I had my eyes full. I'm trying to get the car back over in the middle of the lane. And then all of a sudden this big green-and-white thing is sideways in my lane.”
Force’s erratic Mustang crossed the centerline which caused a disqualification, but for the moment no other consequence.
“I was on the brake trying to get the front end back so it would steer right when it hit the cones and the wheels hooked,” Force said.” I had my hands full.”
Beckman later explained his reaction.
"In these cars everything is delayed,” Beckman added. “You hit the throttle, there's a small delay. You lift off the throttle, there's a small delay. You move the steering wheel and it doesn't respond right away at speed because there's so much downforce that everything deflects and it's got play in it. So, it looked like I wasn't doing anything for a while.”
Force was working hard to avoid a crash and Beckman was working and thinking as well.
"I'm telling the car to go right,” said Beckman “I'm steering the car right and it's not going right. And there's Force further in my lane. So, this is that moment when you're thinking, ‘Do I try to lock the brakes up, which means letting go of the steering wheel with one hand, or do I try to get back on the throttle without being too abrupt and squeeze on through?’
Force had busy eyes too.
“It was all I could do to find my location on the track,” Force said. “Then all of a sudden I see this big ole blue and white car. When I first came around I got a glimpse of him,” Force said. “I was that far sideways. That is when I thought I am going to ram him.
"I thought man I am driving him right up into the grandstands. He moved over just enough that we both cleared and he didn’t tail-end me. I can’t even remember if I saw him before or after. You have to be a long ways around. You don’t really see him you just see a blur. That is all you see. I recovered it and then he went by me and I think I saw him both times. I am glad we both walked away.”
The tense part of the moment was over in fractional seconds.
"So I'm trying to squeeze the throttle down and by that time he'd started moving over some, and I shot by him. Other than that, it was a pretty uneventful run," Beckman said with a laugh.
“I made a hard left turn and I just missed him,” Force said. “He was watching out for me too. I have to compliment Beckman for that.”
Later Force watched a video of the incident and was able to put words to the action.
“Nobody knows this better than me," Force said. "At the end of the day whenever things go wrong you are counting on reflexes. You are counting on the guy in the other lane and that was Beckman. I wanted to see why it was so violent. It was obvious that it went right, I brought it back too far left, I brought it back and right when that happened, it smoked the tires. When you are coming back you have your car jacked up and all of a sudden when I hit that throttle it made a right turn and the tires went out.”
Beckman knew he was close to Force but there was no time for measurements.
"Too close," Beckamn said. "There should be a minimum of a 30-foot distance between these cars. It's never as close as it looks from the side or behind because there's overlap in your vision. But I don't think there was more than 15 feet between us. And I don't recommend that at 200 mph unless you're driving in left turns."
Force walked the track to place memory in perspective.
“Nothing better than to go to one end of the track and look up at it and see where you were in trouble,” Force said. “Then go to the other end and look back at it to see where the process started. That could happen again and I don’t want it to do that to me again. I was doing everything I could do.
“It never should have gotten loose,” Force said. “We were a little surprised. Part of the game is beating the track.”
The next track for Force to beat is in Topeka where two short, hard lanes await huge speed.
Photo credit: Gary Larsen @ Racetake.com
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