The first picture you have there is actually an alcohol or promod head. They are a lot different than a Fuel head. Nice pics!

 

Yep, that's the head from the Eaton Cutler-Hammer team (promodheads.jpg).

Those boys were running low 6's @ 210 MPH! Have you ever seen their truck
and trailer?

Golf carts, tool box, ATV's, and even a BBQ matching the car's color scheme.
Some people just have too much sponsorship & money!

 

The inflation pressures are adjusted in 0.1 increments. We had the same pressure in both rear tires. Some teams do stagger the pressures a little right to left, but I don't know which is which.

Tires usually last about 5-6 runs (at $500 each tire), but some of the low-buck teams run them longer. Sometimes tires only last 1 run as they get cuts and gashes in them if they run over something.

Our team dynamic balanced all of our tires. Some teams go the cheaper route and static balance them. Everywhere you see a piece of colored 'racers tape' (duct tape ) on the wheel, that is where the weights are placed. Sometimes there is 8-10 oz of weight in one spot on the wheel.

Usually a bad tire is spotted during balancing. If it requires more than 10 oz of weight in one spot, we would dismount it and rotate the tire 180* on the rim and try again. Most of the time that would take care of the problem, but if not, we would take it back to Goodyear and get another.

If a tire spins on the wheel or a weight comes off, it's usually noticed in the pits during the warmup. The car shakes more than normal! Other than that, the driver can also tell on the burnout if something is wrong. He will also feel vibrations then.

 

Well, not really. Most teams just run a standard solid roller lifter and flip and/or rotate them out often. There is a company out there that makes a really trick lifter that on the exhaust side, it has a double roller. From the exterior, it looks like a regular lifter, but inside the body is another roller (exactly like the one on the bottom) that rides up against the bottom one. These are supposed to be the best out there (expecially for the price-$1500 a set), but some teams havn't had much luck with them.

 

I was talking to a friend that works at Comp Cams today and he was telling me about that lifter with the double roller. He said the cylinder pressure is so great when the exhaust valve opens that the pin in the lifter would shear off. He said the exhaust rocker is a solid tip design for the same reason.

Another thing he said was the loud pop you hear is the end of the explosion. They open the exhaust valve a little early so the explosion of nitro pushes the exhaust out instead of the piston. That minimizes pumping losses.

This has been an interesting thread. I really enjoy watching the fuel cars run. I think that anybody that has every been down a dragstrip needs to see them.

 

I just noticed someone asked for a shot of the valves.

Here's a view of a charged alcohol head (Cutler-Hamer's entry):

http://members.rogers.com/tdese739/promodrunner.jpg