T-Bird vs T-Craft

[flyguy]

Yesterday afternoon late as I was about to roll on my takeoff on 32 I looked over and my friend was sitting waiting on the parallel taxiway in his Ford Thunderbird (the late model roadster). He had given me a prop a few minutes before. The wind was dead calm.

I rolled, and he rolled parallel. When I broke ground I pushed the nose over and held it about 4 feet off the deck, full power needless to say. I don't know how fast I got up too as I was enjoying dividing my attention between flying and watching the T-Bird.

We pretty much stayed together with him dropping back some and then having to brake as I did a zoom (less than 60 degrees of course), at the end of our 4000 ft runway.

Surprise; today we are talking on the phone and he says, "That was amazing, as soon as you got off and pushed the nose over you started pulling away from me. I couldn't keep up."

His bird has a 4.0 V8 with twin-overhead valves and probably developes 300 HP or close to it. I was flying the 12D-85 with very little gas in it so it was "light" but it is somewhat heavy anyway.

Needless to say I am rather astounded. I probably will do a HP per lb comparison considering I now know what my T actually weighs. See if it makes any sense. Edit: Wiki says 280 HP for the later models.

Darryl

[Robert Lees]

Re: T-Bird vs T-Craft

(slight thread drift)

Lets say the you are driving the average $140,000 Lingenfelter twin-turbo powered Corvette Z06. Over a mile up the road, a Top Fuel dragster is staged & ready to launch down a quarter-mile strip as you pass by it. You have the advantage of a flying start. You run the 'Vette hard up through the gears and blast across the starting line & pass the dragster at an honest 200 MPH. Just as you pass the Top Fuel Dragster the 'tree' goes green for both of you.

The dragster launches & starts after you. You keep your foot down hard, but you hear an incredibly brutal whine that sears your eardrums & within 3 seconds the dragster catches & passes you. He beats you to the finish line, a quarter-mile away from where you just passed him. Think about it - from a standing start, the dragster had spotted you 200 MPH & not only caught, but nearly blasted you off the road when he passed you within a mere 1320 foot long race!

That's acceleration!

Background:

* One Top Fuel dragster 500 cubic-inch Hemi engine makes more horsepower than the first 4 rows at the Daytona 500.

* Under full throttle, a dragster engine consumes 11.2 gallons of nitro methane per second; a fully loaded 747 consumes jet fuel at the same rate with 25% less energy being produced.

* A stock Dodge Hemi V8 engine cannot produce enough power to merely drive the dragster's supercharger.

* With 3000 CFM of air being rammed in by the supercharger on overdrive, the fuel mixture is compressed into a near-solid form before ignition. Cylinders run on the verge of hydraulic lock at full throttle.

* At the stoichiometric 1.7:1 air/fuel mixture for nitro methane the flame front temperature measures 7050 degrees F.

* Nitro methane burns yellow. The spectacular white flame seen above the stacks at night is raw burning hydrogen, dissociated from atmospheric water vapor by the searing exhaust gases.

* Dual magnetos supply 44 amps to each spark plug. This is the output of an arc welder in each cylinder.

* Spark plug electrodes are totally consumed during a pass. After 1/2 way, the engine is dieseling from compression plus the glow of exhaust valves at 1400 degrees F. The engine can only be shut down by cutting the fuel flow.

* If spark momentarily fails early in the run, unburned nitro builds up in the affected cylinders and then explodes with sufficient force to blow cylinder heads off the block in pieces or split the block in half.

* Top Fuel chassis is already at 60mph in one length of the car.

* Dragsters reach over 300 MPH before you have completed reading this sentence.

* In order to exceed 300 MPH in 4.5 seconds, dragsters must accelerate an average of over 4 G's. In order to reach 200 MPH well before half-track, the launch acceleration approaches 8 G's.

* Top Fuel engines turn approximately 540 revolutions from light to light!

* Including the burnout, the engine must only survive 900 revolutions under load.

* The redline is actually quite high at 9500 RPM.

* THE BOTTOM LINE: Assuming all the equipment is paid off, the crew worked for free, & for once, NOTHING BLOWS UP, each run costs an estimated $1,000 per second. The current Top Fuel dragster elapsed time record is 4.441 seconds for the quarter-mile (10/05/03, Tony Schumacher). The top speed record is 333.00 MPH (533 km/h) as measured over the last 66' of the run (09/28/03, Doug Kalitta).

(shamelessly stolen from another bulletin board)

[flybikefarm]

Re: T-Bird vs T-Craft

My wife has a 2005 50th anniverary Tbird. It has a 3-9 liter aluminun V8, same basic motor as used in Lincoln LS and Jag. It is rated at 280 HP. Fords advertising says it will go 139 mph, I've had it to 120 and it was still climbing fast. George

[flyguy]

Re: T-Bird vs T-Craft

I don't know what the bird weighs for sure, but if you use 3800 lbs (it is probably more like 4000 loaded with gas and passenger and considering it is a convertible) it comes out that I have a better power to weight ratio by about 10 percent. Even better at 4000; 12.3 vs 14.3 lbs/HP I will have to check the T-Bird weight sometime.

I didn't blow his doors off or anything like that, but he was flat to the floor as we accelerated from about 50 indicated and I was pulling away from him.

Of course we were limited to under 90 or so as he ran out of runway and had to brake. I'll have to check and see what speed I accelerate to level, at 3/4's of the way down the runway.
DC

[Forrest Barber]

Re: T-Bird vs T-Craft

Robert Lees , you have stolen a very valuable piece of information. it is printed and in my pocket for coffe shop BS . the revolutions are the amazing part. I used to drop the hammer on a top fueler many moons ago and knew hardly any of that information. WOW!

[Larry Lyons]

Re: T-Bird vs T-Craft

I read that artical about a year ago. Could not believe it so I did some of the math. AMAZING is all I can say!!
Larry