(Jeff Burk photo)

DRO: What’s the story with when you see guys do a burnout and they don’t back into the burnout tracks and they actually move the car over a full tire width?

DW: That’s because with the compounds we use today, it pretty much rips the rubber off the track when we do a burnout. Where you burnout, there’s not as much rubber on the track, so we get off to the side, do the burnout, and then back into a different set of tracks where there is good, clean rubber.

DRO: How about air/fuel ratios? How do you know when to richen or lean one out?

DW: Unlike a normally aspirated motor where you might look at EGT’s and O2 sensors, we only look at parts after a run. If you have a piston with rings that are tight or there’s black on the sides of the pistons, that’s obviously a sign of it being too lean. When a nitro motor leans out, it detonates. There are two ways to fix it, either richen up the cylinder with a bigger jet to get more fuel to it or the definite method is to chop .015” off the top of the piston in the hole, which lowers the compression in that cylinder. That’s a definite, sure-fire fix because there’s less cylinder pressure and it’s less likely to detonate.

DRO: So, what’s it look like when it’s rich? It just drops a hole?

DW: Not always; sometimes it just doesn’t run that well. If it’s rich, it looks new and it’ll be obvious. The other cylinders will have some kind of heat or some kind of markings and that one won’t. It changes with every supercharger a little bit.

DRO: That’s another thing I wanted to hit on. We know you guys dyno superchargers. Do you only have two or three favorites? Are they that different, or are they much closer these days? Are the boost curves that much different from one to the next?

DW: Just a little. Problem is that we’re running on that razor’s edge now-a-days where we didn’t used to run that close to the edge, so we had a little cushion there that we don’t have today. With the competition we have today and racing to 1,000 feet, which shortens the track a little bit, you know a thousandth of a second can sometimes mean everything.