Drag Racing Heathcote drags.

I attended the drags at Heathcote Park yesterday along with @Frankster

An interesting day. A large crowd.
I am not a massive fan of drags and burn outs but it was awesome to watch and here the top fuel machinery. back at HPR for some side by side racing for the first time in 30years.

 

Some pics from the event. Sorry, no 250s.

 

More pics.

 

On display only. Not running. V12 Merlin powered.

 

Last few.

 

A few more detail pics of NitroVooDoo.

 

Some interesting observations about the design of Nitro VooDoo:
1) Note the welded bar on the throttle tube, presumably for better throttle control
2) Strange little stubs on the exhaust pipes. These appear to be closed and facing the rear wheel. Not sure what these are for.
3) A preference for sizable coils and conventional plug leads rather than COP.
4) Extremely stiff looking rear end.
5) Carbon rear brake
6) Twin fuel injectors for each cylinder. One each side of the intake cam. These appear to squirt onto the back of the intake valve.
7) Engine breathers??? well behind the back wheel, mounted on the wheelie bars.

 

Back at Heathcote yesterday with @Frankster for the Bike Mayhem event. A lot smaller scale than the Top Fuel event but still a reasonable number of competitors and spectators for a bike only event.
I think there were about 36 competitors for the elimination style competition in the afternoon and possibly up to double that for the test and tune in the morning.
The weather was just perfect and the track pretty good too.
Being a bit of newb to this type of motorsport, I am still a bit unfamiliar with the general format, but in a nutshell here is how the day went.
The morning was used for test & tune were you get to practise side by side passes over the 1/4 mile. You just line up and have a go (after paying the appropriate fees and passing scrutineering). If you were well organised you effectively got up to 4 or so practise runs to sort out machine and brain.
@Frankster bike looked great. To quote my daughter, it looks pretty. Now, hopefully looks will translate into speed.
The day got off to a cracking start with a first up run in about 8.5s on a nicely prepared supercharged Suzuki 1340 powered custom drag bike.

 

@Frankster had made a few improvements? since being out last time which was getting on to 2 years ago. This changed the characteristics of the bike and was taking some time for @Frankster to master during practice. Minimal flywheel mass, some changes to the gearing and a rebuilt clutch was proving to be a bit difficult to master off the line. With a lot of time being lost at the start during practise.
There were no other 250s in sight. Most other bikes were considerably faster than the little Kwaka over the quarter.

 

The format for the afternoon was a handicapped competition.
Each competitor nominates their expected 1/4 mile time (dialled in time) and they aim to be as close as possible to this time through out the day.
If you better your time over a run, this is termed a "break out" and results in you loosing that run.
The start time for each lane (2 lane format) is decided based on the difference in "dialled in times", with the faster rider being held back to make up the difference in times.
In theory, if both riders run their nominated time, both riders should cross the finish line at the same time.
If a rider goes early (before the green light for their lane) then this results in an instant loss for that run and is signalled by a red light on the count down tree.

 

The initial pairing for the dialled in runs is decided with a simple ballot process where you draw numbered, coloured chips from a bucket. With like numbers being your pairing for the first run. The winner of each run is paired against other winners and the process continues until a final winner of the event is determined. Based on the number of entries, this was expected to be a process of several hours.