8/8/03

Ed. Note:  Wady Hamam or Pro Mod Wad as he is known in the sport as drag racing's main nitrous Guru. He has been involved in nitrous oxide injection almost from its inception especially with the Pro Mod division.. He is originally from the Buffalo, New York area and has been involved in all types of racing from flat track motorcycles to fuel dragsters. In his wasted youth he even raced a fuel funny car powered by a blown and injected small block Ford! He and his brother campaigned a front motored Top Fuel dragster and lost a race against Don Garlits at the now closed Niagara Falls Dragway. His advice about nitrous problems is highly sought after but he is hard to get to. He has agreed to answer one question every couple of weeks for Drag Racing Online readers. Email your questions to: promodwad@dragracingonline.com, and he will answer the question he finds most intriguing. (Original caricature Pete Millar)

Wady,

Could you PLEASE help me? I run the annular nozzle, single stage Fogger in the NMCA racing series. We run a .049 nitrous / .043 fuel jet with 10 lbs. flowing out of a .121 flow jet.

Any suggestions on this tune-up so we may go faster would be greatly appreciated. We currently run on 10.5 tires at 3030 lbs. with a glide. We're running 7.76 at 175 mph.

John

John,

What you are telling me is you run a very rich fuel tune-up so you must be also running lots of timing. Both the nitrous and the timing are trying to create detonation, but the tune-up is so wet that you are probably not causing any engine damage.

My suggestion to you (without knowing all the facts) is to get the fuel pressure down into the six pound area through a .72 to .74 Holley jet and get timing back down to where the engine can really use the nitrous.

The annular nozzle has a tendency to pull fuel from the end of the nozzle due to the nitrous flow and that makes the tune-up even richer, so you will not have to worry about hurting anything in that pressure range. You will need to check spark plugs for color and heat to help you get the ultimate tune, but I feel you will see a definite performance increase as the engine will not be getting overloaded with fuel on the big end of the run.

Once you have determined what you like in the jetting map you mentioned, you can then start to tune with jet changes for even more performance gains.

Wady Hamam