Unfortunately, drag racing's premier sanctioning bodies and their drivers have paid a heavy price for those crowd-pleasing performances. Exploding engines and tires and blowovers began occurring more and more often as the speeds climbed and ET's dropped.

Sanctioning bodies, team owners and drivers accepted the increased danger that came with the ever-improving speeds and elapsed times. The fact that a premier driver hadn't

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suffered a career-ending injury or been killed lulled everyone into a false sense of security. There were also financial considerations because, make no mistake, all auto racing and especially drag racing has depended on speed and the inherent danger of the sport to attract fans. If that weren't the case and all drag racing fans wanted to see was close racing, the stands would be packed to watch 8.90/9.90 classes at National events.

Just how important is performance to the commercial success of IHRA and NHRA events? According to Rockingham Dragway's owner/operator Steve Earwood, who has two IHRA National events a year at his North Carolina track and formerly ran Billy Meyer's Motorplex and worked for directly for the NHRA, performance does convert to ticket sales.

"Every time a Funny Car or Top Fuel car runs a really big number," Earwood said, "the next event on the calendar, at every track I've been involved with, the phones start ringing. Fans want to know if the car or driver that ran the big number is coming and if so, how do they go about purchasing a ticket."

Until the tragic death of driver Darrell Russell at NHRA's St. Louis race last year everyone involved in professional drag racing apparently felt the risk-reward factor involved with nitro racing was acceptable. Russell's death may have changed all of that forever.

In the weeks after that accident NHRA and IHRA took immediate steps to both slow down nitro-burning cars and improve the driver safety factor. The new rules for safety have been universally embraced and there are more coming down the pipeline, but the rules designed to slow down the fuel burners proved totally ineffective, just as all the ones before them had.

For the 2005 season NHRA's advisor on nitro racers, Ray Alley, on the directive of his bosses came up with a new method that absolutely will slow down the nitro cars. It is a device developed for NHRA by the MSD Ignition company and it has already been tested and proven. According to NHRA sources they will be on all fuel cars by the Gatornationals at Gainesville, FL in March.

Here is the device itself with the fickle finger pointing out the actual part.

The device, which MSD developed and has incorporated into their Pro Mag ignition system that virtually every Top Fueler and Funny Car has, is a rev-limiter that will limit the max rpm for fuel cars to 8400 rpm.

According to an engineer I spoke with at MSD, here is a basic overview of how the device will work. It is designed to be activated when the injector blades are wide open. After a four-second delay the device begins monitoring crankshaft speed and, if the RPM exceeds 8400, then the device will drastically retard timing which is supposed to keep the engine rpm from ramping up. The unit will cost the teams about $150. It comes sealed from the factory and is non-adustible.