Car appreciation... the aesthetics, the engineering, etc

There were some drag race facts that I saw about the same time as that photo. Likely you've all seen them, but some of them are mental:

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 1-1/2 gallons of nitromethane per second; a fully loaded 747 consumes about the same amount of jet fuel 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 nitromethane, 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 halfway, 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.

• 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.

I was surprised how few revs (540) the engines actually does on a run.