(Jeff Burk photo)

NHRA’s Nitro Pros Open 2014 Season with Week of Testing at IHRA’s PBIR

Words by Jeff Burk
Photos by Jeff Burk, Steve Gruenwald, Ron Lewis and Gary Nastase

Don Schumacher Racing Funny Car driver Ron Capps’ 4.003/320.28 and Al-Anabi Racing Shawn Langdon’s 3.726, 325.37 in Top Fuel were the stars of the Professional Racers Organization’s 2014 pre-season Winter Warm-Up event at the IHRA-sanctioned Palm Beach International Raceway in Florida. This annual event, held at PBIR for the last four years, marks the unofficial start of the NHRA’s nitro racing season.

(Steve Gruenwald photo)

There were a total of 22 nitro-burning Funny Cars and Top Fuelers representing the NHRA’s premier teams on the premises including the mega teams of Don Schumacher, John Force, and Connie Kalitta (although not the Top Fuelers), plus most of the sport’s nitro hitters were present.

The event is capped by a two-day finale of side-by-side qualifying on Friday and Saturday that, unlike the preceding days, is open to the public. A combination of ideal atmospheric conditions (temps in the low 60-degree range) and a primo track yielded some very impressive speeds and ETs.

It appeared that few teams were trying drastically different combinations but were instead “massaging” what they have been running for the last year or so looking for hundredths not tenths of a second improvements  over last years performance.  

The only new product visible at the test was a new version of MSD’s Rev-limiter and the NHRA tech department did send a couple of rev-limiters for Top Fuel and Funny Cars to test that limited the engine RPM’s on a Top Fuel car to 7700 and 8100 for the Funny Cars.