TAKE A RIDE IN A 10,000hp DRAGSTER!

have you ever heard of a two-seat 10 000 horsepower top fuel dragster well you're just about ready to find out i'm with larry dixon this weekend and we're down in memphis tennessee we're scheduled to give five rides this weekend one on friday and four on saturday the weather around memphis has been kind of iffy it's rained a lot and it's made conditions here a little rough on the track we're going to do the best we can with what we got to work with now i want to show you what happens every time that we travel with this car we take all the body panels off and generally i personally inspect every weld on this car right here i'm taking a can of brake cleaner and i'm spraying every weld watching to see if there's any kind of cracking going on i do both sides of the car then i come back and i come back with an anti-rest agent that i spray back all over the whole frame rail and then we'll assemble that body back on this thing you know it's not like this thing doesn't get checked out at the shop but in the travel you never know what's going to happen so we always always inspect our chassis the first day when we show up at a racetrack so they finish assembling the car in the meantime i'm going to take a look at the weather now based on the temperature the barometer humidity the amount of grains and the performance altimeter i'll make decisions on what gaskets that we're going to put on this thing so what i'm talking about are the head gaskets we change these things in thousands increments to get the right compression that we want we will also use the blower overdrive as another tuning feature you have to predict what the weather's going to be when you're going to run the car so say in this situation it takes us an hour so to put it together and get everything rolling we need to predict what time we're going to be on the track and what the weather's going to be at the time we're going to run it every ride in this car is like going to your final at a national event everything has to be perfect we'll adjust the valves slap some valve covers on this thing and we'll get this thing fired up during the warm up larry likes to see the clutch and give that extra experience to his right we also cycle the system and go through all the different components that operate the clutch the timing and we'll recheck all that stuff on the computer the team then they'll check the clutch setting they'll go back and double check everything on the car and put this thing down and then we'll stick as a rider in this thing our first rider is joe hollis you ready to rip all right now joe's ready to roll so we'll roll this thing out of the pit and tower up to the start line see what we got i'm good you good yeah you got hotter track right yeah should be all it should be perfect all right have fun forget the burnout's the funnest part after the burnout back up we'll make those idle adjustments and everything and then i'll make sure your visor's down i'll ask you know double check now i give you you give me the okay sign everything's good we're gonna shoot out there as much as you prepare one of these cars for an experience that people have put a lot of money down to happen it still makes you so nervous because these things sometimes have a mind of their own now this is what we're dealing with here the track conditions here are not ideal we've got a lot of peeling behind the starting line here and you have to remember this car is four foot longer than any car out there it kind of sets in no man's land that's where cars don't run or don't start out at the rain that they've had around here has been making the rubber not adhere to the asphalt so we're doing our very best to work with what we got so i'm pulling larry up to where i want him to do the burnout i want to be on those burnout tracks so we have some fresh rubber to roll on you know each run in this car is like final eliminations every time if you don't get a little butterflies in your stomach then you're probably doing something wrong somebody going to grab this from me grab this from me when nah i can grab i can whatever i can pass it to you or whatever right here uh 10-4 all right almost spin it larry okay clear so after clearing the motor oh chris here he hooks up the blower looper and i'll go up to larry and ask him if he's ready to roll ready yes sir okay switch deal it's all good all right i got this thing we had a little smoke coming out number seven [Music] the burnout lands pretty close to where i want you know there's a very fine line here within six inches or so where i needed to put this thing but it actually looks pretty decent so so [Music] as a crew chief that's nothing but disappointment right there this thing needs eight cylinders to make everything right not seven yep number seven seven had a bunch of oil pumping yep you see that [Music] as hard as you try sometimes nitro methane can make you look real stupid you know you're trying to burn 60 gallons a minute at the step of the gas you can look down here on the track look at this tire hopping it's catching spinning catching spinning we call that tire shake the power has to be there to get through the clutch as a rider that is irreplaceable to get to ride with larry dixon on the pedal job yeah who else can say they've ever done that yeah yeah i mean it's sideways out there i get it but it's not what's yeah hold out at seven couldn't and something was wrong because they couldn't get the idol up that's 2500 i had everything out cocked balls there's no words for this really yeah there's nothing to describe well that wasn't the best ride but that's the wildest ride still together oh yeah yeah something happened number seven man it's on seven cylinders yeah is that what caused it yeah so we're gonna figure it out and get this puppy back together oh i'm ready to go again he's not here i told him you're gonna get an argument from me about going again so the team's doing their best to get this thing turned around as fast as we can we definitely got some weather coming in we also have some issues yeah right there um you've got the top right yes it's right here still on the crank okay gotcha pedaling one of these cars to make it down the track is very damaging sometimes so we're just going to give it a whirl tomorrow all right gentlemen ready go all right let's do it today's problem is the track looks like crap because of all the rain we had last night it's a crap shoot all right [Music] [Music] starting line kind of looks worse than what i thought also when larry did the burn out the car drifted to the left so we're gonna have to try and straddle these tracks and get him in the track when he gets back [Music] if you look up by the front wheels you can see how cricket the burnout was and how far the car is not in line with the burnout [Music] [Music] just rip the rubber right off the track when a motor freewheels like that from spinning the tires it's really hard on the valve train you can look here it broke a retainer on the intake we're lucky it just didn't blow the whole motor up we're going to give these riders another chance we're going to go to a track that we know we're going to have good conditions that they're going to get a full pull and they're going to get their money's worth this is a tough job it's a tough ownership to have one of these things there's not another one in the world like this and there are no books out there telling you how to tune a two-seat top fuel dragster so everyone was in agreement to do it at a later time so just cut our losses and head home you know they always say there's light at the end of the rainbow and hopefully this was a good sign for us on our next outing we landed back here in indy you know with her tails between her legs kind of got ourselves beat up a little bit by this track but i guarantee you this we'll be back out there and these guys are going to have the ride of their lives and i'll be glad to help them do that

Channel: Rob Wendland

Views: 510,390

Rating: 4.8176103 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: 8NJtmuBhDXc

Length: 13min 58sec (838 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 12 2021