7 Effective And Cheap Ways To Lower Your Quarter Mile Time #blogpost

I’m sure most of you already know how to make a car go around corners better or drift better, but not many people know in detail how to make a car accelerate better. They may think that you can just throw a bunch of horsepower at the car and it will just run 9 second quarter miles all day every day. There’s more to it than that, a great drag car has some fine tuning throughout the car to make it go fast.

One: Nitrous Oxide

This is a pretty underrated power adder. Why not a turbo or supercharger? One word, price. Just look at supercharger and turbo kits at Summit Racing’s website, and you’ll see they can easily cost 4 figures and up. Meanwhile, you can get your hands on a pretty good nitrous system for about 500 US dollars. While you do have to refill nitrous bottles, but you should be able to fill up with a cost of 3.50 to 5 US dollars a pound. If you do things right, you should be able to get an increase of 250 horsepower on a stock engine. Engine Masters did it, so you might be able to do it too.

Two: Drag Radials

What’s the point of having a buttload of power if just all goes up in tire smoke? Drag radials might not make a big difference if you’re doing 1 mile drag races, but they make a huge difference in eight mile and quarter mile times. There’s nothing like a car that just hooks up and goes. Mickey Thompson, Nitto and Hoosier are some household names for drag radials, with some tires you can actually drive on the street. If you have a two wheel drive vehicle like rear wheel drive or front wheel drive, you only have to worry about putting drag radials on the driven wheels. Guys with all wheel drive cars will have to buy 4 drag radials to get the maximum effect of the added traction.

Three: Drag Shocks And CalTrac Bars

Believe it or not, a good suspension can make your car launch better at the drag strip. Not only that, it can prevent you from wheel hopping and breaking parts. Adjustable shocks allow you to tune the car for really good weight transfer when launching so the car can effectively move force to the driven wheels (unless you have a FWD car). If you have this plus some drag slicks, expect fast 60 foot times.

Four: Cheap Engine Swap

Sometimes you just have to let it go. Not every engine is destined for drag racing glory, that’s where engine swaps come in. The right engine for you may depend on where you live. It could be a 454 big block in the States or a 1JZ in Australia. Just pick whatever has the best tunability for the cheapest price.

Here’s a note for those who live in either the USA or Canada. When it comes to cheap power, the bigger the engine the better. While a Ford 302 small block has to have thousands of dollars thrown at it to make 700 horsepower, a 496 cubic inch stroker motor can make that kind of power with just a few simple mods.

Five: Tuning And Rebuilding

This might be the cheapest way to knock tenths of your time slip. Fiddling around and replacing worn and broken parts is cheaper than throwing speed parts at a car. Whether it’s putting new jets into your carburetor or upping the boost on a hand held controller, tuning can actually make a big difference for a car. That, and blow by sucks engine power, so new piston rings can help a lot.

Six: Weight Reduction

You can either do this for free or spend some money on it. Stripping the car of all unnecessary things is a good start but you can also add aluminum wheels, cylinder heads and intake manifold and fiberglass body panels and doors; plexiglass windows can help too. You can improve improve your power to weight ratio without even adding additional horsepower to your engine.

Seven: Shorter Gearing

Rear gears can make or break a car depending on what you want it to do. If you want to go fast and don’t care about top speed, slapping some shorter gears into a car can really wake it up. You can swap out your ring and pinion gears for about 200 bucks, which is a bargain for the acceleration you can gain.