How to Make Adjustments to Your Car in NHRA Racing

Video Transcript

TINA STULL: Hi, I'm Tina Stull and I drive the Top Dragster for Interstate Batteries. On behalf of Expert Village, today, we're going to talk about the basics of racing. Where most of the adjustments are going to come when you're racing is going to be in the pit in between. For me, I have somebody who does the mechanics on my car, and I like to look at it as the two of us are racing together. He's the one who puts the car together and puts the package together and then it's my job to deliver it. So I kinda think of myself as a delivery system for whatever he's set up. But the adjustment that the driver could make is from the cockpit area is we do adjustments with, like, our delays. Each one of us--as you do your qualifying runs, say, you have a 10-red light and then you have a 10-light and then you have a 20-light, which is just basically 20/100 of a second and in that, what you're going to do is set up your delay box. You want to make sure that you don't go red so you might add some numbers in there. At the last minute, a lot of times drivers will adjust that. Cloud conditions, if the light changes as you go later in the evening and it starts to get dark, your eyes tend to get more sensitive. And so you might want to add some numbers in there to make sure that you don't go red. If it's cloudy and you're in bright sunlight one second, cloudy and then it goes back to bright sunlight, you might pull some numbers out. Pretty much in the beginning, you probably won't do too much of that just because it takes a while for a driver to settle down and know exactly what they're going to do consistently with the light and with the reaction time. But that's where experience comes in from other drivers. There are a lot of drivers out there that are willing to help along the new people, give them some advice, but you got to realize these are also the same people that you're going to be racing. So just like with your friends, they're great people out there but take everything with a grain of salt, and that's why I felt it was so important to go to a school initially so that I always had that basis to go back to. But definitely, they give you a lot of hints and stuff.

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