What it Really Means to Take a Drag Car to the 3.50s

The unsuspecting eye, a casual racing spectator might think that drag racing is easy. Just throw a big tire on a powerful car and smash the throttle, right? Well, that’s not exactly the case as anybody who has ever really competed in the sport will tell you. Instead, things get rather complicated sometimes and definitely aren’t as simple as they might appear to the casual fan.

However, there are lots of companies out there trying to make high-level racing more accessible. These companies hope to take the more challenging aspects of the sport and bring them to a level where tuners and drivers can have more control over what they’re doing. Not only will this close the learning gap but it’ll make cars faster across the horizon as well. The faster that car goes, the more important that this sort of usability becomes.

This time, we get a truly up-close and personal look at what exactly it means to make a car go incredibly fast. In the case of Luis de Leon behind the wheel of the Chilly Willys Racing Camaro, it’s a combo that’s going incredibly fast. They get more specific, de Leon has broken deep into the 3-second range, blasting the nitrous powered machine all the way to the 3.50s at the Shakedown Nationals.

By following along below, we get a little bit of an idea about the work that goes into making an operation like this tick. de Leon describes the weekend and what exactly was integral to making the car perform on as high a level as possible. Sometimes, runs like this simply aren’t possible without a company like FuelTech onboard, providing electronics that can really make all of the components of the car come together in unison to slam home the best pass possible.