Me drag racing

Here is my 9sec Corvair i run in S class RWD lobbies.


This is my low 10sec Gremlin i run in the American Muscle lobby. Best pass to date is a 10.2.

Pretty nice Boost... ok so now educate me. In building a drag car... what are your priorities? Obviously low weight, high power, and ungodly accel are important but trades have to be made as you build from the stock vehicle and you can't get everything so eliminating 4 wheel drive, what do you want first in your parts list?

Sorry for the late reply. It gets tricky sometimes when your building a drag car. first off, you have to balance the power and weight. As you build the car you watch the speed, accel and launch. you want them as high as you can get. but for instance, say the car is at 2000lbs and you start adding engine parts to raise the hp, when you hit a certain hp level, you will notice the launch and accel start going back down. thats when you get into the 10lbs of shit in a 5lb bag zone, lol. so you either add weight or reduce the hp. it makes it difficult when your trying to get certain cars into a certain class. some cars just arent meant to be in S class. Its alot of trial and error, fitting various parts to maximize your accel, speed and launch. also most cars, especially muscle cars, a roll cage helps out greatly. it changes the front to rear weight balance and usually works in your favor. one other thing, the race diff will put your speed, accel and launch in the red slightly but you still want it in there. also the race suspension does the same but like the diff, you want that and ill explain why in a minute.

Now, as far as tuning goes, its fairly simple and straight forward. For my example i will be going off of a RWD muscle car. For tires, you want the fronts at MAX and the rears at 35. after many tests, 35 is the optimum pressure. Gearing gets tricky at times. 90% of the time you want a 3 speed setup. unless its a high reving, low torque engine, then you may need to run a 4 speed. some cars you will want to run a 2 speed. So far everything ive built has had a 3 speed. i usually never touch the final drive either. setting 1st gear depends on your engines specs too and is something you normally play with when you test and tune. you want set it right in the sweet spot where it doesnt bog but doesnt spin either. ill get more into that in the next section on launching. The rest of the setup is pretty basic andyou can experiment with it to try to get more out of the car. camber you want at 0 front and rear. toe needs to be at 0 front and rear also. caster is up to you and i dont think it makes any difference. anti-roll bars (if installed) set front and rear to max. spring rates for should be as low as possible for front and high as possible for rear. doesnt make sense right? well rather than the supension absorbing all the force of the launch, its transfered to the tires. you want the ride height at max front and rear. it basically sets the car back up to stock height but what you really need is all the other adjustments that comes with it. this is why i said even though it lowers your accel and launch you still need it. i tested with stock suspension and tuned race suspension and the tuned race suspension hooked better and was all around faster. front rebound all the way down and rear rebound all the way up. same scenario with the bump also but some cars benefit from the front bump at max. brakes i turn the pressure way down. you also shouldnt have any adjustable aero on there. the rear diff i put at max on accel and decel.

Now for launching. The method i use is known as drop catch. You hold at a certain RPM and when the light goes green you continue to hold it there and as the RPM's drop i slowly role into the gas. It takes a bit to get use to and this is where you want to fine tune 1st gear. to high of first gear will basically stall the car and too low will just spin out the gate. You have to experiment a bit to find out what the best RPM is to hold at. When you get it just right, the car should hook real hard at launch and as the rpm's start dropping, you slowly give it gas till you feel like it wont break loose at full throttle. then you just floor it. try to shift around the top of the engine torque band. for example, the hemi engine like to be shifted around 6k even though your able to rev higher.

I hope this helps out and if there are any other questions, feel free to ask. i may have left out some stuff and will update as i go along.


Im gonna copy and paste this later in the tuning section.