[jim_howard_pdx]

Chico and Kevin,

Your two cars could not be different.

Look at the ET's Kevin runs now, and where he wants to be. Kevin is looking at the 8's, and i know Eric4Nitrous is looking for mid 7's.

Their cars will be purpose built quarter milers, with light small front tires, and a front suspension designed to allow the car to rise quickly and to transfer the vehicles center of gravity to a rear pivot point. This weight transfer, with proper rear suspension geometry will put the pinion angle square to the gear, put maximum bite on the drag slick, and allow the car to transfer the engines rotational energy into tire rotation with the least loss of torque.

So at a point when you shift your et's from 11 second quarter miles to 10 second ET's, you are deciding that you no longer are going to have a street friendly car, you are going to go for a launch friendly car.

Wait, there are even more changes. The front swaybar goes bye bye, or at least is diminished in size. Front springs are added that work to rapidly push the car vertical with a dampner that allows near unimpeded spring rise (10-30% damping), but very high spring compression valving (70-90%).....you have to smooth out the ride, as the front tires come back to the track surface.

So Kevin's ride is not going to be able to corner like my ride at .96 G's in the corners. And my ride is not going to cut 60 ft times like his 9 second MISSLE.

The engines can be very much the same, after all we put a 2,000 hp merlin rolls royce aircraft engine in a hot rod once. That car did nearly 300 mph at Bonneville, got sold, then later we heard it crashed and killed the driver!

My 9.2 second Mustang was very much a street car, with only suspension add ons and safety equipment like the cage. I could have run an 8 second bracket just by going to a purpose built quarter mile chassis. But we were making lots of money street racing, that paid for all our engineering tweaks.