Description
Inside this 100-page book, you'll learn tons of information and tips from seasoned drag racing professionals. Backed by over 35 years of combined experience, this guide covers everything from the proper way to haul your drag race car to the importance of utilizing data acquisition. Hundreds of diagrams and photographs are used throughout the book to offer a comprehensive, hands-on approach to tuning drag race door slammers.
Key Information Covered:
• Squaring up the car
• Driveline and pinion angle
• Rear suspension, anti-squat, and anti-roll bars
• Wheelie bars, shocks, and springs
• Front suspension and transmission mounts
• Driveshafts, brakes, and parachutes
• Wheels, tires, and aerodynamics (spoilers and splitters)
• How to scale your car and find the center of gravity
• Track and weather conditions
• Time slips and chassis setup sheets
Our goal in writing this chassis tuning guide is to provide a tool that everyone can use with ease. Most manuals get too technical - so technical, in fact, that the majority of racers wind up more confused after reading them than they were before they started. This guide is written as a comprehensive, hands-on approach with real-world answers to everyday problems and questions about door slammers.
Most racers do not want to see a lot of graphs and equations telling them how to find the amount of energy in a spring. They want real, reliable information from a professional that can be used to make adjustments to their car when it doesn’t do what it should have on the track. They want to know what caster, camber, and toe-in settings are, and they want to know how the car will behave if you adjust those settings one way or the other. They want to know how to “read” the car and be able to give it what it wants to perform better on the track.
This book is designed to help you learn what to do with your car and to help you learn more about how drag race cars work. This is not a science, geometry, or physics textbook. Rather, this is a simple tutorial on drag racing and how to tune your car to get the most out of it. The only formulas and charts you will see in this book are those that are designed to show you different options available to you and your car’s setup. Many times as you walk through the pits, you will see many racers using the exact same setups because one person is doing really well with it. What works well for one car will not usually work well with any other car. You can take two identically built cars with identical engines, give them a different clutch or different transmission, and they will require different setups
to work properly.
The most important thing to understand is that cars change. Springs wear out. Rod ends get sloppy. Track conditions change. It is very important for you to keep accurate notes with your time slips. This way, if your car starts going left or right or does not 60 feet the way it used to, you have a history that you can go back through and maybe find what changed on the car or the conditions to make this happen. We are firm believers that the car will tell you what it wants/needs to give you its best performance. If you keep up on the maintenance and faithfully document information in your logbook, you will be better equipped to understand what your car needs and how to give it what it wants.
We hope you enjoy reading this book and appreciate its common-sense approach to tuning door slammer cars. Implementing the information contained herein will provide increased performance for you and your car on race day. Dial in your car and rip up the track! Good luck, stay safe, and have fun!
