How did nitrous get such a bad rep...?

-
in the late 80's we literally drug a 318 904 dart sport off a friend's property , slapped an Edelbrock intake and an AVS on it , a set of Taylor wires , new plugs, took it out that night out to our usual 1/4 street racing blacktop stretch. we SMOKED a tuned port fuel injected 350 powered Camaro with that old baby blue Dodge. afterwords , they were so butt hurt about it they accused us of spraying it and hiding the bottle. I opened both doors, hood and trunk and told them to find it. these bitches were so pissed they were yelling calling us cheaters as they climbed back in their POS Camaro and left. that wasn't the only incident .back then when guys would get smoked on the street they automatically used the bottle as a scapegoat to justify getting their asses handed to them when they thought there was no way, their junk could get beat without any power adders. they just couldn't believe that greasy , smoking 318 could run as hard as it did. in all fairness , it did have an 8 1/4 355 sure grip LOL ...
 
Nitrous turns wimpy engines into stronger running engines but sometimes still not as strong as a well built NA engine. So sometimes they try harder and that don’t always work out as planned.
 
pittsburghracer said:
Nitrous turns wimpy engines into stronger running engines but sometimes still not as strong as a well built NA engine. So sometimes they try harder and that don’t always work out as planned.
Click to expand...
so what will your excuse be when you finally do it and go into your spare bedroom and grab all your stuff?..
 
I never lead anyone one on, and always claimed it. They ultimately were jealous!
 
pittsburghracer said:
Nitrous turns wimpy engines into stronger running engines but sometimes still not as strong as a well built NA engine. So sometimes they try harder and that don’t always work out as planned.
Click to expand...

Beat up a lot of high dollar cars doing it. To me it was smart!
 
j par said:
so what will your excuse be when you finally do it and go into your spare bedroom and grab all your stuff?..
Click to expand...
His excuse will be dipping in the 8's. lol
 
1969383S said:
I never lead anyone one on, and always claimed it. They ultimately were jealous!
Click to expand...
Jealous is about right. I never had the 100 bucks for the NOS kit.
We're you the high school quarterback with the 67 Camaro. lol
 
Yeah, The Honest Charlies speed shop loved my refill business I am sure! We are talking mid 80's so no wonder what a re-fill on 2 bottles costs today.
 
fishmens67 said:
Jealous is about right. I never had the 100 bucks for the NOS kit.
We're you the high school quarterback with the 67 Camaro. lol
Click to expand...

Always a Mopar man! I hated the Camaro and Mustang guys! Always a hard worker independent and no time to dabble in sports!
 
TT5.9mag said:
I’m giving you **** cause it’s fun. But I’ll give you one circumstance. I was at irwindale on a t&t night not that long ago. 71 split bumper camaro in the other lane. He stuck a solenoid, ate two pistons. Tore the motor down in the pits, put two new slugs in it and did the same thing on the next pass a few hours later. I don’t hate nitrous. Use what ya got, but it seems a lot of guys burn their junk down with it because the learning curve is steep and people are greedy. Almost the same situation with boost. It is much better nowadays with electronic controls and knock sensors etc. Have fun.
Click to expand...

That's just not using your head. A solenoid sticks and you fire it up again... yikes.

I used to tell the whiners... build the baddest NA engine you want, I'll put a kit on it and beat you with your own ****! Cheating, nah, just a different method to get HP from an engine.

I ran three kits on cars in the 80's when we thought it was burning off electrodes, throw more fuel at it! We learned later that was the wrong thing to do. Go to the boneyard, grab a shortblock, long block slap a cam/heads intake and juice the crap out of it. Cheap way to run fast.

You don't bring a knife to a gun fight... N2O turn some small caliber stuff into howitzers.
 
Last edited:
It's ALL in the tune on anything. Why can one person get a car to run 120 and another gets the same car to run .1-.3 and 2-3 MPH faster. It's the tune and hook.

Nitrous is no different. Base deal. If the fuel jet is the same size or larger than the N2o jet, it's a junk tune at the plate. Too much timing KILLS more juice engines than juice itself (back to the tune up). Run safeguard, fuel pressure switch, window switch, etc to try and protect the engine. Same as a rev limiter, it's there for a reason.
 
Last edited:
So here is my analogy and doing my best to answer base premise for thread. Like many here I too race pretty regular, several on this forum have been at track with me, pictures time slips blah blah blah. I run a stroked 440 in a Cuda, I am old. I still have a fishing tackle box filled with misc Holley Jets! Watching the evolution at the track with regard to EFI I scorned all things EFI. As the years progressed and I continually struggled to be competitive as a result of all the varied track conditions getting my car dialed in while I watched the guy next to me whip out his lap top and take or add HP at different points while I was pedaling throttle to stay straight getting into third gear. I now run EFI on the Cuda. The car is simply put better, it is more consistent, easier to dial in and starts with little to no effort. The evolution of technology is just that. Something innovative that I scoffed at all those years ago is now simply a daily event and common place. Adding a bottle to a car is harnessing the evolution and technology of our sport. But it is in fact change, folks don’t like change. I don’t run a bottle and still put out well north of 600 HP. But frankly that fact has nothing to do with the validity of bottle or no bottle it is just my choice. My car is Sublime, there a lot of folks that hate the color! But full disclosure I love whipping the bottle babies! The ones that scare me are the itty bitty cars on the bottle, them guys fly!
 
j par said:
so what will your excuse be when you finally do it and go into your spare bedroom and grab all your stuff?..
Click to expand...


It won’t be an excuse but what I will have is probably a relatively slow heads up car on nitrous. I sacrificed NA horsepower and won’t have enough power added horsepower to play with the big boys. I bought the car and nitrous back when my son and I were racing more like a team. Also before several health issues hit, also before I hit my 60’s. Monster Mopar also moved their race date to a week when there are three 10,000.00 races 50 minutes from my house at my home track. I built the car to run in the 5.0 area which would be 7’sin the 1/4. In my local heads up series the guys are running 4.60’s-4.70’s which would make me the slow guy.
 
pittsburghracer said:
It won’t be an excuse but what I will have is probably a relatively slow heads up car on nitrous. I sacrificed NA horsepower and won’t have enough power added horsepower to play with the big boys. I bought the car and nitrous back when my son and I were racing more like a team. Also before several health issues hit, also before I hit my 60’s. Monster Mopar also moved their race date to a week when there are three 10,000.00 races 50 minutes from my house at my home track. I built the car to run in the 5.0 area which would be 7’sin the 1/4. In my local heads up series the guys are running 4.60’s-4.70’s which would make me the slow guy.
Click to expand...
5.0 ain't slow.
 
LO23M8B said:
5.0 ain't slow.
Click to expand...


That was my target ET on my budget and racing by myself as these cars are kinda team cars many needing up to run. I don’t have that luxury. 5.0’s is competitive at monster Mopar but not locally. It’s hard for me to let my bracket car sit when three chances at 10,000.00 are almost in my backyard and two chances at 1500.00 are 400 miles away. I know we race for fun but I have fun doing both.
 
pittsburghracer said:
That was my target ET on my budget and racing by myself as these cars are kinda team cars many needing up to run. I don’t have that luxury. 5.0’s is competitive at monster Mopar but not locally. It’s hard for me to let my bracket car sit when three chances at 10,000.00 are almost in my backyard and two chances at 1500.00 are 400 miles away. I know we race for fun but I have fun doing both.
Click to expand...
Yes you got to have cash for race parts. I've been telling my kids daddy needs a new pair of slicks for years. What kind of car are you running?
 
I ran a bottle on my car when I lived in Colorado...since there isn't much atmosphere at high altitude, I figured why not bring your own atmosphere in a bottle, lol. Never had any issues. Sprayed it for ~ 8 years. My car went from high 13's at Bandimere to 11 flat on the bottle...granted, I built that motor specifically for nitrous use.

I agree that nitrous is the cheapest initial investment power adder, but in the long run, the refills add up pretty fast. That is the main reason I stopped using it (cost of refills)...well, that and I built a stroker motor that was faster than the 360 on the bottle. At my current power level I don't see the need for my old blue friend.
 
6.56 not much running around on the street that will beat that. And yes if you gonna run a bottle at higher HP levels you need to build the motor for it. What do you thing about running the 1/8 vs the 1/4. ps what heads are you using?
 
pittsburghracer said:
It won’t be an excuse but what I will have is probably a relatively slow heads up car on nitrous. I sacrificed NA horsepower and won’t have enough power added horsepower to play with the big boys. I bought the car and nitrous back when my son and I were racing more like a team. Also before several health issues hit, also before I hit my 60’s. Monster Mopar also moved their race date to a week when there are three 10,000.00 races 50 minutes from my house at my home track. I built the car to run in the 5.0 area which would be 7’sin the 1/4. In my local heads up series the guys are running 4.60’s-4.70’s which would make me the slow guy.
Click to expand...
I knew that was gonna get ya...lol..:D..
Now back to the original question.. why not Nitrous as apposed to the other power adders???...
 
LO23M8B said:
Yes you got to have cash for race parts. I've been telling my kids daddy needs a new pair of slicks for years. What kind of car are you running?
Click to expand...


It’s been sitting like this since last June when I got rear ended sitting at a stop sign and got a concussion.one of these days I may get my first pass in the car. Should be around 900 horsepower and a 600 HP kit in it.
82DF8453-5F89-4FD5-AE3E-A6701DFE973D.jpeg
BE76AB74-450C-4751-880F-3DA2A9F6B15A.jpeg
CFFA263E-5813-4A67-B30B-86E9DD56EABD.jpeg
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
-

Back
Top