Since forever this has been discussed, so let's talk about it some more.
I have always been told that spinning at the starting line doesn't affect trap speed mph (or kph). In the past I have never had the slightest issue with spinning at the track because the cars were always wearing slicks and set up for maximum weight transfer. With my old Skylark in the 1/8 mile, I was never concerned when I would 91.6mph on one pass and 92.4 on another, and the ET was always consistent (in my case high mph = worse ET, and low mph = better ET), but never worse than 7.41 vs 7.47 or something like that. That was until yesterday.
I left my car set up in 'road race' mode with big sway bars, coilovers set up for handling, 20" Nitto 555r, 18" street tires on the front. I literally did nothing to improve the situation for drag racing. I wanted to shake off the rust from a 6 year track hiatus and I was also interested in seeing what the mph was going to be just to punch into the Wallace calculator to see how close I was to my hp estimate.
Well, I got zero weight transfer and the car burned and shook the tires for more than 200 feet. Pass number 2 spun through second gear past the 330 foot lights. Fortunately the 18" fronts kept the car going nice and straight.
At stopped at 3 passes for fear of the tire shake breaking something because I had to drive it 50 miles home.
You can see from the 3 slips that on the second pass I spun further and lost 3mph in the process. I'm sitting here wondering what I was actually capable of from a mph standpoint...........because the ETs were going to suck no matter what with that kind of tireslickery. My thought is that if you spin 300 feet accelerating at a lower rate then I'll never hit optimum attainable speed by 660 feet. But this flies in the face of what I've always heard.
I did find this interesting article https://www.w8ji.com/tire_spin_and_...isconception,a thermostat or restrictor" myth
Does anyone have any real world experience that shows spinning and trap speed having a big correlation?
I have always been told that spinning at the starting line doesn't affect trap speed mph (or kph). In the past I have never had the slightest issue with spinning at the track because the cars were always wearing slicks and set up for maximum weight transfer. With my old Skylark in the 1/8 mile, I was never concerned when I would 91.6mph on one pass and 92.4 on another, and the ET was always consistent (in my case high mph = worse ET, and low mph = better ET), but never worse than 7.41 vs 7.47 or something like that. That was until yesterday.
I left my car set up in 'road race' mode with big sway bars, coilovers set up for handling, 20" Nitto 555r, 18" street tires on the front. I literally did nothing to improve the situation for drag racing. I wanted to shake off the rust from a 6 year track hiatus and I was also interested in seeing what the mph was going to be just to punch into the Wallace calculator to see how close I was to my hp estimate.
Well, I got zero weight transfer and the car burned and shook the tires for more than 200 feet. Pass number 2 spun through second gear past the 330 foot lights. Fortunately the 18" fronts kept the car going nice and straight.
At stopped at 3 passes for fear of the tire shake breaking something because I had to drive it 50 miles home.
You can see from the 3 slips that on the second pass I spun further and lost 3mph in the process. I'm sitting here wondering what I was actually capable of from a mph standpoint...........because the ETs were going to suck no matter what with that kind of tireslickery. My thought is that if you spin 300 feet accelerating at a lower rate then I'll never hit optimum attainable speed by 660 feet. But this flies in the face of what I've always heard.
I did find this interesting article https://www.w8ji.com/tire_spin_and_...isconception,a thermostat or restrictor" myth
Does anyone have any real world experience that shows spinning and trap speed having a big correlation?