Consider a typical car, like a Honda Civic. Let's say someone takes one down to a quarter-mile track and drives it as fast as it will go. It might take it 15 seconds to get from one end of the track to the other. A dragster can do the same thing in about four and a half seconds. At the end of the run, the dragster is going more than 300 miles per hour! How can a car possibly go that fast?

The first step is to use a BIG engine. The engine in a Honda Civic might displace 2.0 liters. What does this mean? Think about the piston inside a cylinder in an engine. When the piston is at the bottom, the cylinder can hold a certain amount of air. When the piston moves to the top, it can hold much less air. That difference is called the displacement of the cylinder. In a Civic, the displacement is about half a liter per cylinder. A Honda engine has four cylinders, and the displacement of the four cylinders together is 2.0 liters. A dragster has eight cylinders rather than four, and the cylinders are much bigger. So a dragster engine displaces 8.2 liters. In other words, a dragster engine displaces more than four times as much air as a Civic’s engine. That means it can burn four times as much gas per stroke. Meaning it can be four times more powerful.

Image courtesy NHRA http://www.nhra.com Brady Kalivoda in a top fuel dragster

The next step is to add a blower to the engine. The blower compresses the air going into the cylinder. With more air, you can burn more gas every time the cylinder fires. With a strong blower, you can raise the pressure of the air going into the engine to 70 PSI – more than four times normal air pressure. By combining the first and second steps, you now have an engine that is more than 20 times more powerful than the engine in a Honda Civic.

The third step is to change the fuel. Instead of burning gasoline, a dragster race car burns nitromethane, also called "top fuel." The common chemical formula for gasoline is C8H18. Nitromethane has the formula CH3NO2. From these chemical formulas, you can see that gasoline gets all its oxygen from the air. Nitromethane carries some of its oxygen with it, so you can burn more of it in a cylinder. Burning nitromethane in a dragster’s engine more than doubles the power of the engine. A dragster burns more than a gallon of this fuel every second.

A dragster also eliminates the mufflers, catalytic converters and other things that cut the power of a Honda Civic engine. Meaning that, at the end of the day, a dragster engine is something like 50 times more powerful than a Honda Civic engine. And, a dragster weighs about 500 pounds less than a Honda Civic. A huge engine in a lightweight vehicle means it's going to go fast – really FAST!