Why Is Funny Car Going So Fast
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The first question Ron Capps always gets when he goes on the road to talk about what he does for a living is "What the heck is a funny car?" But that's not the right question (though we'll answer it shortly). The right question is: Are you completely insane?
When his nitromethane-powered drag racing machine takes off from a dead stop in the starting line (called the water box), Capps experiences 4.5 to 5 g's, close to the amount astronauts feel when launching into space. That increases to 6 g's or more when the clutch kicks in about 1.5 seconds into the race. And then, when the parachute deploys to slow the car down, after just four seconds, he'll get 8 or 9 g's in reverse, throwing him forward with enough force that drivers recently began strapping their heads in to protect their neck muscles. "Before we had these head and neck devices, I would wake up the next morning and not be able to lift my head out of bed," Capps says.
Now then: What is a funny car? Consider it a cross between one of those T-shaped top-fuel dragsters and a consumer model car. "Somebody decided they would make a regular car, put a dragster engine in it, and somehow make that car go faster," Capps says.
To do that, they had to change the car's shape, lowering the front and adding a second wheel well in the back so that the engine could sit in the front. "All of a sudden you're seeing cars with two rear wheel wells, and it looked really funny. Some announcer termed it a funny car," Capps says. And that was that.
The challenge of driving one of these things is that it's shorter, stiffer, and much less stable than a standard dragster. "There's not one run I've made, and I've been doing this 25 years, that it ever went straight or I barely moved the wheel," Capps says. "As a fan or someone in the grandstands, you wouldn't see the car moving around, but an in-car camera shows me sawing away on the wheel," he says. He compares the experience to riding one of the dragons from Game of Thrones, if such a thing were possible. "You're hanging on for dear life and it's so out of control you don't know what's gonna happen."
Oh, yeah, also: Funny cars are loaded with compressed, volatile fuel that is usually one errant spark away from combusting. "The first thing that comes up when you Google my name is huge fireball explosions," Capps says. "My son and his friends think it's really cool when his dad's on fire."
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Want to learn more about Ron Capps and NDRA's Funny Car races, including his scariest moment ever? Check out the post-Thanksgiving episode of the Most Useful Podcast Ever, available Monday, November 26.
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Source: https://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/car-technology/a24748560/funny-car-drag-race/
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