Drag racing without cooling or not

[vintagewagenwerks]

I ´ve seen much dragracers in my life ,the biggest engine ever run without any cooling systems ,so there are some different uses i know without any cooling ,electro Powerfan or stock cooling with fanbelt.
So my question why are so different uses ,what is the best for dragracing.At myself i ever drove with the stock typ 1 fanbeltsystem.

[Mike Lawless]

Speaking from my own perspective, there are three distinct advantages to running a drag motor without cooling tin. It can be cooled faster after a run. With the engine exposed, it can be cooled fairly quickly on a normal day either with an external fan, so simply by letting it sit. It depends on how much time between runs. Working on the thing is WAY easier without the cooling tin in the way, and third, it weighs less. Not a big concern for most though.
The disadvantages are just as many. It's hard to simply drive the car around. For example, if one has a car that is on the edge of being a street car, it's difficult to just jump in it and go driving down the the burger joint for "cruise night"on gasoline. Another is if you are in an event where your runs are pretty close together, or you end up "hot lapping" in the late rounds, the motor can can pretty dang hot, on gasoline.
One of the reasons I switched over to methanol a few years ago was to eliminate those disadvantages. The thing just doesn't get that hot anymore. I was able to make four rounds of racing within an hours time last year at the March Meet without stopping to cool off. Still got pretty hot, but on gasoline it would have stopped running from meltdown.

Cooling system or not just depends on what the user wants out of the car

[Airspeed]

Funny you mentioned that 3 advantages as the only one I could think of, you did not even mention  : It frees up 10-20 hp depending on rpm!

[vintagewagenwerks]

yes thats right generators eats the horsepower.so i think an electric fan could be a good use for it.My car is a streetcar ,i do not often dragracing because in fear of cracking my old engine ,there is no money to get a new one at the moment.But i appreciate it is a a heavy kick of adrenalin when  you start and a lot of fin doing it again and again.

[Mike Lawless]

Never even considered the fan. Even when I ran a shroud back in the DRKC days and in the first year of SG, I ran an electric fan that blew into the shroud, while the alternator was just the alternator. So, the fan thing is a good point.

As for the alternator, I've ran it both with and without the belt and it made no difference in ET