Early Funny Car Guys

I was checking out a article on Tom Mcewen"s Hot Wheels funny car. I noticed a stock fuel pump on the 426. What the ? Did they use it to warm the engine on gas? Seems out of place.

 

There is no way a motor set up for nitro would be or could be fed gas. Usually, low doses of nitro or straight alky was the fuel of choice.

 

maybe they just couldn't find a block off plate

 

Some used it to pump water through engine to allow long burnouts, staging, pleasing the crowd stuff. This was before using 'solid' block material.

 

We used straight alcohol to warm our nitro motor up. Then switch over to nitro.
If it was cold out, below 50 degrees, I would mix about 25% gasoline in the starter bottle with the alcohol. The engine would fire easier if it was cold with the gas/alky mixture.

 

Looks out of place. I did notice in the pic that the car has two large polished tanks in front of the engine. Maybe one was for alky?

 

Something like this.

 

It looks like they're using the stock fuel pump as some kind of air pump. If we could see where the line goes,that would give us the answer.
I know that back in the days of hand-pumped pressurized fuel systems,some guys would run a setup like this to help maintain pressure in the tank during a run.

 

It's plumbed to a manifold thats bolted to the block were the water pump should be.

 

Used as a small vacumn pump to relieve crankcase pressure ,(blow by) we have used them on bracket race engines with questionable results.

 

I've got a magazine from 1966 that specifically talks about the birth of Funny Cars as well as the AFX's and Altered cars... it'll take a while to find it but I'll post it as soon as I can.

 

Looks just like that. Just a chrome stock looking pump. I'm starting to feel like Rain man.....yea..deffi...yea...deffi...got a stock pump on that Hemi!

 

You're way off man...I've warmed dozens of fuel engines hundreds to times on straight pump gas fed from a squirt bottle. Alky takes too long to build even heat. Also use the gas to shut them down to burn up any remaining nitro in the ports and lines.
As for the mechanical pump, lots of guys used those back in the iron block days to circulate cooling water.

 

I've seen tons of squirt bottles filled with gas for start ups. As for actual warm up usually it alcohol. We always used alky to start up, but used gas to shut down like White Punk said. It would lube the lines, o-rings, fittings, pump, cylinders, etc. before putting it in the trailer. Alky and Nitro eat up stuff like crazy when left sitting. Back then one tank was coolant and the other was the fuel tank. I think they used that pump to circulate water like was said earlier.

 

I used an alky system to warm on for a while, but found that I could build enough heat through bottle feeding the hat through a small orifice squirt bottle. After 30-45 seconds on the bottle, I just reach down and slowly turn on the nitro. MUCH simpler this way...also closer to what the actual temps and conditions are when the car is started for the run itself.