Opps. Nitrous and Rice Rocket don't mix.

LordRaiden

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Dec 10, 2002
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Was watching some dudes yesterday evening doing street drags near where I live out on an old airfield that many street draggers frequent around here and saw some good drags by some common street cars, both foreign and american. It's really amazing what a bunch of hobbyists can do in their garages around here. Some even come here from Chicago, Detroit, and we even got one Florida once. They race every friday, cold, rain, or otherwise. In fact, last night it was only 10f!!

Anyways, to get to the point, one of the later races had a sooped up Mazda RX-7 pitted against a nicely rigged Dodge Viper. Well, both blew off the line and remained almost even till about halfway down the track (they were doing half mile drags) at which point the RX-7 hit his onboard nitrous (it was plain as day when he switched to nitrous.) causing his front end to jump up a good 6-12" and allowed the RX-7 to pull away from the viper like it had stopped cold. The kicker came when he came about 200 feet short of the finish line.

The car suddenly lurched hard forward nearly burying the nose into the track as his engine and a nice sized fireball exploded out of the front of the car and all over the track. When everyone got down there to see what had happened all we found was the shreaded remains of the front of the RX-7 all over the track, the block still glowing a bright red and the driver standing along side his vehicle trying to put out the last of the fire. That was just crazy! There couldn't have been much more than the lower crank case, part of the oil pan and assorted parts from the lower half of the engine plus the crank shaft left on the strip.

Guess it just doesn't pay to super charge a rice rocket with nitrous. :)
 

LordRaiden

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Dec 10, 2002
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Yeah, I'll have to see if someone had a video of it. It took them a good hour to clean the track off after that. :)
 

Eli

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Oct 9, 1999
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:Q

LOL! He's lucky he wasn't killed by a flying sparkplug.
 

bolido2000

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Dec 3, 2001
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Were they racing for pink slips? Who is so stupid to risk one's car just to claim a kill?
rolleye.gif
 

LordRaiden

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Dec 10, 2002
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Hey, when you're talking these guys, they switch on the testosterone and switch off their brain most of the time. I've seen guys do some really dumb stuff out on that track.
 

LAUST

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Sep 13, 2000
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What made it explode? I've seen some insane wrecks in my time and engines blow, but nothing explode into a fireball.
 

LordRaiden

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Dec 10, 2002
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My guess would be more along the lines of a flash of fire caused by the block exploding and riping the fuel and nitrous lines wide open. That's all I can figure.
 

wnied

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Oct 10, 1999
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A ricer and his nitrous kit are soon parted. Most of these idiots just buy and install the nitrous kit without the proper upgrades and pressure regulators. This idiot must've been one of them. Most usually blow the upper plenums off the engine and leave an oil slick for the clean-up crews at said tracks. But sometimes if your lucky you catch one of these morons that have a larger bottle than intended, with an unregulated amount of pressure shooting to their cylinders, giving them what they believe to be a longer blast for their buck, when what they really end up doing is turning their cars into rolling matchsticks.

~wnied~
 

brxndxn

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Apr 3, 2001
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A guy that worked at the same company as me used to use 50hp nitrous injections in his 96' 6-cylinder Mustang. They worked fine..

Then, one day at the track, he tried a 150hp injection. It basically threw two rods and made the block useless. HA HA

Should've bought a V8...
 
Apr 5, 2000
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Guess he's been watching too much The Fast and the Furious

"It doesn't matter if you win by an inch or a mile....a win is a win!"

Guess the RX-7 "won" when his hood flew past the finish line at 300mph...
 

amnesiac

Lifer
Oct 13, 1999
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Originally posted by: wnied
A ricer and his nitrous kit are soon parted. Most of these idiots just buy and install the nitrous kit without the proper upgrades and pressure regulators. This idiot must've been one of them. Most usually blow the upper plenums off the engine and leave an oil slick for the clean-up crews at said tracks. But sometimes if your lucky you catch one of these morons that have a larger bottle than intended, with an unregulated amount of pressure shooting to their cylinders, giving them what they believe to be a longer blast for their buck, when what they really end up doing is turning their cars into rolling matchsticks.

~wnied~

Could be that, or it could just be the stress of the nitrous and the already notoriously unstable twin turbo rotary engines.
 

Antisocial Virge

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Dec 13, 1999
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"It doesn't matter if you win by an inch or a mile....a win is a win!"

That sounds almost like something John Force would say. My best line from him was " The difference between me and the guy in the other lane is that I'll put an engine on the moon to win" He speaks the truth also.
 

ThisIsMatt

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Aug 4, 2000
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Originally posted by: wnied
A ricer and his nitrous kit are soon parted. Most of these idiots just buy and install the nitrous kit without the proper upgrades and pressure regulators. This idiot must've been one of them. Most usually blow the upper plenums off the engine and leave an oil slick for the clean-up crews at said tracks. But sometimes if your lucky you catch one of these morons that have a larger bottle than intended, with an unregulated amount of pressure shooting to their cylinders, giving them what they believe to be a longer blast for their buck, when what they really end up doing is turning their cars into rolling matchsticks.

~wnied~
Too bad he doesn't have cylinders, huh?
 

BatmanNate

Lifer
Jul 12, 2000
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Originally posted by: ThisIsMatt
Originally posted by: wnied
A ricer and his nitrous kit are soon parted. Most of these idiots just buy and install the nitrous kit without the proper upgrades and pressure regulators. This idiot must've been one of them. Most usually blow the upper plenums off the engine and leave an oil slick for the clean-up crews at said tracks. But sometimes if your lucky you catch one of these morons that have a larger bottle than intended, with an unregulated amount of pressure shooting to their cylinders, giving them what they believe to be a longer blast for their buck, when what they really end up doing is turning their cars into rolling matchsticks.

~wnied~
Too bad he doesn't have cylinders, huh?



LMAO Owned.
 

slikmunks

Diamond Member
Apr 18, 2001
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Originally posted by: amnesiac 2.0
Originally posted by: wnied
A ricer and his nitrous kit are soon parted. Most of these idiots just buy and install the nitrous kit without the proper upgrades and pressure regulators. This idiot must've been one of them. Most usually blow the upper plenums off the engine and leave an oil slick for the clean-up crews at said tracks. But sometimes if your lucky you catch one of these morons that have a larger bottle than intended, with an unregulated amount of pressure shooting to their cylinders, giving them what they believe to be a longer blast for their buck, when what they really end up doing is turning their cars into rolling matchsticks.

~wnied~

Could be that, or it could just be the stress of the nitrous and the already notoriously unstable twin turbo rotary engines.

man... don't get me started.... it's not notoriously unstable... it's notoriously overboosted and undertuned... why do people have such problems? well let's see... they start with all the power mods, without the reliability mods first.... this increases boost... and one of the best mods on a rotary is the exhaust, right? so they get a dp and a mp... dp is great, takes a way a lot of heat from the engine, reduces bay temps, increases boost a little bit... mp... if you don't do ur other mods carefully and get larger injectors, you get boost spike while running lean... this causes engine to detonate... and when you add nitrous, you have to be even more careful while tuning... problem is, that the rotary is VERY vulnerable to detonation... it's like the grim reaper... whereas it's not quite as bad for piston engines, so they can mod without tuning more easily with less problems... read: rotary needs knowlege and tuning... rotary in the hands of a ricer? :tear; bye bye rotary... damn ricers... go buy another car to mod. :|
 

slikmunks

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Apr 18, 2001
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Originally posted by: rootaxs
Define "Rice" and tell me how an RX-7 is a "Rice Rocket". ;)

an RX-7 != RICE ROCKET!!!!:|:|:|:|!!!

and to the original post by the thread starter... most people don't have onboard nitrous... i don't think that's what you saw... it makes NO SENSE to have onboard nitrous and to "flip the switch" while doing a drag race... just cuz that's how they did it in gone in 60 seconds doesn't mean that's how everyone does it... most people use WOT switches, where the nitrous flows when the switch is flipped and the car is at WOT. IMHO, you probably saw an rx7 (maybe or maybe not on nitrous) with a big single turbo, exiting turbo lag and prob'ly hitting an efficient 20lbs of boost or something on race gas, but as to what happened to the car, i got no clue.......
 

flavio

Diamond Member
Oct 9, 1999
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I met a guy once who had an 1100cc Ninja with Nitrous. The bike looked pretty sweet but the guy said it could hit 200mph which I wasn't sure if I believed or not.