National Hot Rod Association

At 8,000 horsepower, Top Fuel and Funny Car engines have more power in one cylinder than entire Formula 1 engines (750 horsepower) and NASCAR Nextel Cup engines (850) produce. But even on a power-per-cubic-inch basis, nothing compares. A 146 cubic-inch (2.4 liter) F1 engine puts out about 5 horsepower per cubic-inch, and a 358-cubic-inch NASCAR small-block about half that much. Drag racing engines pound the ground with an earth-shaking 16 horsepower per cubic-inch.

"The power's in the fuel," says Jason McCulloch, crew chief for the Toyota-supported Al-Anabi Racing dragster driven by Larry Dixon, the top-ranked driver in the current NHRA Top Fuel standings. "We really noticed it 10 years ago, when NHRA made us go from 100 percent nitro to 90 percent [and later to 85 percent]. That took away a lot of power. But nitromethane is an oxygen-bearing fuel, so there were ways around it. We overcame the drop in nitro percentage by upping the compression and the overdrive."

Today's nitro-burning engines are fed by massive fuel pumps capable of delivering well over 80 gallons of fuel per minute. Top Fuel dragsters and Funny Cars gulp about a gallon of fuel per second when they leave the starting line and about 1.3 gallons per second (80 gallons a minute) from the half-track mark through the finish line. Top Fuelers reach 200 mph in just 100 yards, 280 mph by the eighth-mile mark (660 feet off the starting line), and in excess of 320 mph at the finish line, which arrives just 3.7 seconds after they blast off the line with a deafening roar.

"These cars make the power they do because of manifold pressure, the type of fuel, and the amount of fuel we're able to burn," says McCulloch's Al-Anabi Racing teammate Dickie Venables, crew chief for the Toyota Funny Car driven by Del Worsham. Fuel delivery ramps up from 50-60 gallons a minute at the hit of the throttle to 80 in just two and a half seconds – roughly at the point on the track where the clutch completely locks up.

"The clutch starts loading the engine about a second and a half into the run, and it's typically locked up and done by two and a half seconds because that's where the maximum load is," Venables says. "Probably 99 percent of the time, making horsepower isn't the issue anyway. The challenge for every crew chief out here is finding the best way to apply all that power to the racetrack with the clutch – that's where most of the real tuning is done. I don't think I've ever said, 'We really need to make more power for this round.' It just doesn't happen."

Nitromethane is such a volatile fuel that static compression ratios are much lower (exact figures are a closely guarded secret, of course, but they're in the neighborhood of 7:1) than can be found in other kinds of racing engines. If nitro racers attempted to use anything close to the compression ratios found in methanol- and gasoline-burning engines, the cylinder heads would be jacked off the block the instant the driver hit the throttle.

"The nitro itself creates so much power that your job as a crew chief hasn't been to make horsepower for a long time now," says Venables, 50, who's been working on fuel cars since the 1970s. "You'd think it would be, but it isn't. When we were allowed to run 100 percent nitro, most people didn't – it was more like 97 or 98 – so you could always up it a little if you needed to. But you still have more power in reserve today – right there, any time you want it – in the ignition timing. Just add a couple of degrees, and 500 horsepower is available to you, just like that. Five-hundred horsepower sounds like a lot, but when you're talking about an engine that makes 8,000, on a percentage basis, 500 horsepower's really not that much."

Of course, no engine dyno has ever been designed that can withstand the power and torque generated by the modern nitro-burning engine. Top Fuel and Funny Car racers were making thousands of horsepower decades ago, and advancements in cylinder heads, initiation systems, and, over the past few years, superchargers, have pushed power levels into the stratosphere.

"We call it 8,000 horsepower because that's what they say it takes to move 'X' amount of weight that far that fast," says McCulloch, whose father, Ed "The Ace" McCulloch, drove fuel cars for 30 years and has been a crew chief since 1994. "I've been around this stuff for a long time, and 8,000 is the number you hear, but who knows what the number really is? Until somebody finally builds a dyno that can handle it, we'll never know for sure exactly what it is, and there's only one reason it's so high: nitro."