,
Once in the burnout box, the driver floors it to do a burnout; he burns out well past the starting line. If the driver attempts to modulate the throttle here or anywhere, the engine will blow up. The driver engages the transmissions reverser and a crew member guides the car backwards to the staging zone. Other lesser crew members (me) scrape the tires clean as this is going on. The engine is running so rich that we are all running around in an oily foggy cloud of flammable nitromethane vapor. This stuff burns your eyes, throat and lungs. This huge cloud can probably easily blow up and consume us. The fumes probably give some sort of gruesome cancer. The crew stands so close to this quivering screaming hair trigger machine that if someone messed up and it blows up, people are going to be hurt, perhaps badly. I felt like a member of the bomb disposal unit in “The Hurt Locker”.
The driver eases the car to pre stage an the crew lifts off the body and the crew chief flips the fuel system control to full rich and fiddles around with a gross adjustment mixture ratio screw, tuning by eyes, ears and balls. If this is done wrong the engine will blow up. Now how many times have I mentioned blow up here? The thing has hundreds of ways to blow up just at the starting line and we are all standing within feet or sometimes inches of this grenade. This craziness creates an intensity for the crew which can only probably be equaled by the deck crew on an aircraft carrier recovering planes. At night. During a storm. While under attack from enemy fire.
The cars stages and launches when the light goes green. There is no fineness involved here; the driver has to instantly floor it. Anything less and the engine blows up. If you are in the crew, the effect is stunning. You are pounded by a 150+ DB blast of noise as well as a pounding concussion that knocks the wind out of your lungs. You are blinded by the fumes, deafened by the noise and made dumb by the concussion that makes speaking impossible, as if you were standing too close to a detonating 105 howitzer round.
This is what crewing for a Top Fueler is like. Were we in pain, yes, were we dirty, yes, we were drenched in a smelly and flammable mixture of oil, nitro, methanol, rubber dust and sweat. Was it scary, yes! Would we do it again? HELL YES and this time I want to turn wrenches!
