Floating On Thunder Road: Drag Boats On Fire
Posted by Jonathan in EQUIPMENT on 03-06-10 No Comments
With college basketball not really compelling yet, and not much else on, I gotta say, for shear sports tech love these days it’s tough to beat drag boats. This weekend, The Speed Channel ran the finals of the Lucas Oil Drag Boat Racing series. There was some decent coverage of the so-called Top Fuel Hydro drag boats, which raced earlier this year at the Firebird Raceway in Chandler, Arizona,
No doubt, these are some serious pieces of hardware: Top Fuel Hydros are 19 feet long, 93 inches wide, and weigh about 3,200 lbs. with driver and fuel. Props turn at a simply insane 28,000 rpm. 3,000 is really fast for most normal power boats. And features a legit General Dynamics F-16 cockpit windshield to stand the strain, water spray and pure speed.
These suckers can get up near 260 MPH. On the water. Wooh!
The cool part is these boats are un-restricted racers, with no wind tunnel testing or advanced R&D budgets. So basically if a racer wants to put a 6,000 HP engine in one of these bad boys, and see what happens they can. Never mind that Top Fuels regularly get airborne, flip over, catch on fire or otherwise fall apart. You wanna go fast. You go fast. What happens is up to you.
And that is what racing, and sports really, is all about. Got to LOVE that.
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