why are 8,000 hp drag cars are coming apart ?

a good friend and old drag racer sent me this,
it`s a long read but interesting , seem`s like common sense may have saved some crashes and lives ?
http://competitionplus.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4358&Itemid=24

 

Common Sense is a scarce commodity.

 

NASCAR looked the other way,on seat belt mounting,
and it cost them their biggest name driver,Dale Earnhart.

NASCAR looked the other way on head and neck restraint,
and it cost the lives of Adam Petty,Clifford Allison,and a few others.

NHRA has dodged a few bullets,with chassis failures,in Top fuel and Funny Car.

So will they do the right thing ?
Or sit on their hands.





Force and Coil should know better.

 

Wow! Thanks for the link. Very interesting article. Sounds like a messy situation. Do yourself a favor and get in a comfortable chair with a cold drink, because its a long, in depth read.D.

 

i work in a chassis shop and build limited street, outlaw 10.5, and pro-modified chassis. i am in no way an expert but do work with these materials every day.

its the condition A or annealed chromolly that gets me in this article. in all 3 of these classes above that i work on a condition A chromolly will not certify. i cant understand this company and the nhra certifying an "annealed" chassis. we are only allowed to use condition N or normalized chromolly. the process needed to weld annealed chromolly is long and expensive and i can garantee that they are not followed to build these cars. they would be far too expensive and no more safe. thats why only normalized is used in the 3 above classes. from the knowledge that i have you can anneal a chassis after welding only if its normalized. you have to heat up annealed and then weld and cool at a very slow rate or the welds become very brittle. sounds like that has been the problem with these chassis from this chassis builder.

again im no expert but this seems to parallel what ive learned so far in this industry.

now i do know that in john forces wreck it "looks" like the chassis came apart in the "detach zone" or the "break away zone" . its designed to break away at the feet to get that part of the car away from the wreck. in his wreck it looked to break away before impact with the other car due to tire shake at 250+ mph. the orange cone shoots from the middle of the track right under johns back tire and the car goes into a violent tire shake. this ends up causing the rest of the wreck.

i dont know im just giving my opinion (guesstimate) but i still dont understand the before mentioned condition A chassis.

 

damn!

 

If they enforce the rules they don't have a show . allot of money involved.

 

I'd hate to think that this is all about the $$$'s

 

The cars are going faster than the tire technology they are using. Metal fails when the tires shake. Forget all the hoopla about type-N or hardened, blah, blah, blah.

The sooner people quit buying tickets to this brain-dead event, the sooner it will be over.

Nostalgia went down the same road. Idiots going 5 seconds in cars and diggers that are about as nostalgic as a PT Cruiser. It sent everyone home who can't afford to run a six-figures a year.

The only thing I'm waiting for, is the NHRA to let the cacklefest cars run down the track. They are safer than the crap doing 4 and 5 seconds. Those things are just accidents waiting to happen.

Faster than 7 seconds, is purely corporate racing. Yawn...

 

well also i know that they only allow a certain number of chassis builders to build these top fuel chassis. thats how they keep the money down. if everybody in the world were allow to build these chassis they would be certifying 100,000 different chassis and turning ALOT of them away because it takes some serious time and understanding to get one of these chassis to certify. it also takes along time to build one of these. alot of sleeved bars in these cars. so they pick a few builders that they know will certify and only deal with them. quick and keeps the costs of the sport down. thats why you will see so many of this one company's car in a class.

 

For some,it is.




Actually,Money and Ego.

Dangerous combination.

 

"Faster than 7 seconds, is purely corporate racing. Yawn..."

i build these "faster than 7 seconds Yawn" cars and yet i could not agree more!!!!!!

 

What sort of idiot would design a chassis
to "break away" behind the drivers feet ?

 

The car owners have the power to stop this situation.

 

im sorry... in front of the drivers feet. to get the motor away from the driver.

yet johns feet are clearly dangling in front of the break away zone. not good.

 

Wow! good read, no wonder I hate NHRA anymore. Viva la HAMBdrags!

 

Interesting quote: Dr. Metz further suggests that, “A successful chassis could be made from either condition N or heat treated 4130 chrome-moly tubing – or from 6061-T6 aluminum for that matter – provided that the chassis is correctly designed and constructed with care.”

That's true, but the thing is, the chassis were designed to use normalized tubing, instead they were built with hardened tubing!

The problems they're having because of using hardened tubing don't surprise me....that's the nature of metals. The harder they are, the less elongation they have, so the more likely they are to fail catastrophically when overloaded.

I'll leave the political implications for you'all to sort out.

 

What they are trying to do is create a driver pod or capsule, same as Formula 1 and IndyCars. The car should shed parts (weight and inertia) so the driver stops quickly with minimum forces transmitted to the body. This is proven, good design in other series, and the fuel classes are trying to find the combo that works. It will take time, and maybe more injuries. After all, most safety rules are written in blood, whether cooking dinner or driving over 300MPH.

 

Come on guys, the days we(I) dream about were far less safe than the space age stuff they do now days. Just like 50 years ago, the chassis and tire technology are playing catch up to the HP output. That's part of the excitement of the sport, being a fuckin' cowboy, so to speak. The board track racers and early dirt track drivers are immortalized nowadays because of there fearlessness. Now I can't speak for everyone, but although I've never driven a sub four second missile, I've done some pretty hairy shit in some pretty scary(unsafe) cars. Come on, these guys are a lot safer doing' 2-300 mph on the track than you or I are driving on the 5 through LA in the wife's minivan. Give me a break, the shits so safe it's boring(nascar especially). In big name racing Hot Rodding is dead. Period. Rant Over.

Drew

 

Go Navy! Eject!

 

yep they got alot of tv but i bet they would have more people in the stands if they would set up new classes. classes that thrive on creative fixes and solutions rather than engineering degrees and money. lets see some classes for the guy who has 300 dollars and good set of tools in his garage!

 

Wow. Just, wow.
That's a hell of an article. Well worth the read.
The NHRA is blinded by the $$$ just like Nascar is.

 

AMEN to that!

 

Last I knew there were dozens of classes to do just that.
The problem is the general public would not pay to watch a 6cyl font engine dragster or a T with a four cyl and a 60 year old cyl. head.

We have to remember the few thousand of us that would support that type of race would not even begin to fill the stands or attract sponsors.

In everyday drag racing there has always been someone who has more money than anyone else. You can talk enginuity or talent or whatever but this seals almost everyones fate.
Yes Hollywood movies make this stuff happen but it doesn't happen in the real world.

 

Absolutely!!! I've been dreaming about building something faster than 10 seconds but that seems to be the cutoff for affordability.

 

This whole scenario is nothing new. I've been a drag race fan for 50 years, and as performance continues to increase, it often reaches a point that the cushion of safety starts being exceeded with more regularity.

I'm sure there is a real challenge in keeping a violent machine, with the horspower figures we see today, from self-destructing when something fails. I would bet the vibrations from an out-of-balance top Fuel or Funny Car tire would shake a dump truck apart!........and of course it will quickly find the weak link in a chassis design!

NHRA has had to continually upgrade specifications over the decades, and they will find a solution this time, but this will not be the last rash of accidents. The involvement of "fan-favorite Force" has just made this episode more talked about.

As far as it being about the $$$, I seriously doubt that people involved in the management of this sport are trying to kill their stars for profit. That would not make any sense.

 

They do. It's called Bracket Racing... YAWN.

If the NHRA wants to put 'em in the stands, get rid of Pro Stock Bike and scoop up the Pro Mods or the T/F FED's.

Why does McKinney still insist on using hardened tubing? After reading the article, it seems like a no-brainer to use Condition N. Is it something to do with the slip-rail chassis??

 

Yeah, when 8,000 hp nitro fueled machines pull up to the line to begin their violent journey down the 1/4 mile, it's pretty boring.I'd much rather see $300.00 cars running 10's or worse, any day of the week.

 

That's pretty scary.

I work in the Aviation Industry (I'm a Maintenance Inspector). If there were an accident anything like that involving an aircraft, and the materials were found to be not to spec (and if it failed in a manner different than the stated material does, it is by definition, not equivalent) people would be in jail, right now.

As to why Mr McKinney chooses to continue the use of hardened chromoly, I'm sure he has a good reason.

I would like to point to the fat people that were suing McDonald's, when Mickey D's changed there fry grease back from that Olestra crap ('cause it was making people sick) at least some of the litigants were awarded money, as the 'change showed prior knowledge of the problem' (which is bull, but that's our legal system). I would hope Mr McKinney's reason was more than to just cover his own ass, but we will never know till (if ever) he publicly tells why.

 

For various legal reasons there is a lot more to this story than has been told. The fact is that McKinney is the only chassis builder that I know of that actually has engineeers on staff.
The big problem with this whole scenario is that John Force was involved. Just like the NASCAR deal with Dale Earnhart, the fact that the sports biggest star was found to be mortal has prompted a bunch of "knee jerk" reaction, some of it from people who have chosen to ignore or distort the facts.
If the heat treated/"hardened" tubing is so much of a problem why did JFR run cars made with that material at Las Vegas and Pomona. Only Robert Hight was in a car not built by McKinney. Bear in mind that John Medlen has done a huge amount of research on the science of chassis construction, materials and welding since Eric's death. Ford Motor Company's engineers have also been heavily involved in that research.

Roo