Drag Racing with Jasso

On saturday 11th March, Duncan and I went out to Willowbank Raceway to see my brother Jason drag race his GTX 1970 Monaro. Although most of you know that we are not car heads, it was still a very exciting and interesting time. We learned more about the sport that Jason and Lindsey are involved in and appreciated the science and art of getting the car to perform. So you know, I'll try to explain how drag racing works....(you might be thinking right now that the answer is intuitive, but there is more to it than just racing another car to the finish line).

There are 4 time trials first where Jason gets to test how fast his car can go over the 1/4 mile distance. He gets a time for each test run and all the variables are documented (by the lovely Lindsey) like track temperature, tyre pressures before and after, reaction time, and many other things I had no idea about. Once he has his times, he then has to nominate a time that he thinks he will run in the race itself. So for instance, he had times of 10.46, 10.46, 10.54, and 10.54 secs for each of his runs, and based on the variables he thinks will be there for the race and changing tyre pressures etc, he must pick a time that he thinks he'll run BUT if he goes faster than that nominated time, he loses, or if he goes slower than the nominated time then the car he is racing could win. So it is quite difficult to pick a time and race as close to that time as possible. Jason chose to dial in 10.49 for his first race, but unfortuantely, he was 0.09 seconds slow and the other car was first over the line. Not much in it is there! (The other car is also racing it's own time so if they had dialed in a time of 10.30 seconds for instance, there would be a staggered start with Jason's car starting 0.19 seconds before the other car and it's still a race to the finish line).

The other interesting things about Drag racing is that when they first drive up to the lane, they have to do a big burnout on some water to heat the tyres up. This is done so that when they drive off from the starting line, the tyres grip straight away so they don't skid (see from the pictures above). Also, when they are at the starting line, Jason holds his accelerator to the floor, but he has this button on his steering wheel that locks the gearbox in place so that it doesn't drive (see green button on steering wheel above!). So when the lights flash to start the race, he simply has to lift his thumb off the button and he's away and racing.......