Yahoo Autos What It's Like Pulling a Drag Chute at Over 300 MPH
Ron Capps on pulling a drag chute.
If things go well, you’ll have bruises around your eye sockets from the force of your blood bursting your veins. If things go poorly, you’ll have bruises everywhere from taking a 300-mph ride into the net at the end of the sand trap. “I’ve only been in one a couple of times,” three-time Funny Car champion Ron Capps says casually, as if it were no big deal to slide upside down in the gravel at speeds faster than a bullet train. He pauses for a second, remembering the feeling of winning the round and then realizing the parachutes hadn’t deployed. “It was not good.”
This story originally appeared in Volume 21 of Road & Track.
Capps pilots the NAPA Auto Parts Toyota Supra Funny Car in NHRA drag racing. Nitro Funny Cars are some of the quickest-accelerating cars on earth, hitting speeds of more than 330 mph in less than four seconds. They achieve this in only 1000 feet, leaving around another 1640 feet or so to slow down. Given that a Porsche GT3 RS takes about 514 feet to whoa from 150 mph, you can imagine the force required to stop something going twice that speed. To manage it, Funny Cars and their stretched sisters, Top Fuel dragsters, use parachutes along with carbon-fiber disc brakes. But there’s more to the halt than simply pulling a rip cord.
The use of parachutes in straight-line racing can be traced to the late Fifties. Racer Jim Deist, whose day job was making military parachutes for Irving Air Chute in Glendale, California, is generally credited with the first use of a chute in drag racing, although racers from both drag-strip and dry-lake speed runs were experimenting with the idea at that time. Deist and dragster driver Abe Carson began testing a parachute specifically for automotive use in 1956. By 1959, chutes were required safety equipment for any racer hitting more than 150 mph at the end of a quarter-mile run.
The first chutes were massive, blooming in a single gorgeous cloud around the back of the car. They were the delight of photographers but hit the drivers with punishing negative g-forces. So violent was the deceleration that by the Nineties, when the cars were first breaking the 300-mph mark, the force of stopping was nearly ripping drivers’ eyes from their heads. The king of the sport, “Big Daddy” Don Garlits, was forced to retire in 1992 after the retina of his left eye detached in testing. Eight years later, five-time Top Fuel champion Joe Amato stepped away from the cockpit because of retina tears in both eyes. Today the nitro classes use a two-parachute system that hits with “only” 7 g’s.
So what do 7 g’s feel like in the negative? “I’m always trying to think of how to explain it,” Capps says. “You’re picking up a lot of speed the second half of the track. The acceleration gets unbelievable. It’s like you’re in a Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica movie, like hyperspace. And you’re accelerating so hard and so fast that you have to focus your eyes exactly where you need to time [the deployment of] your parachutes. You have to have internal timing in your brain based off how fast the run is going, because you want to make sure you’ve got the parachutes out before you get to the finish line. If you hit that cable at the finish line, you’ll be way past when the chutes actually deploy.
“First of all, you’re glad when [the chutes] hit. I feel almost affectionate toward them. You can sort of tell the speed of the run by how hard they pop and how hard you’re trying to stay in your seat because the force basically wants to throw you out the front of the car, but you’re strapped in with 13 different straps. Thankfully, years ago, we started going to head-and-neck devices. Because prior to that, the hit would just tear your neck muscles. There were mornings I would wake up and I couldn’t lift my head up off the pillow. You can feel that pop against the tethers of the head-and-neck device. It’s violent, and if they happen to hit on both parachutes simultaneously, it really hurts. But it also slows you down very quickly. You don’t even have to touch the brake.”
Capps has been driving cars that require a chute for more than 30 years and has seen the evolution from one chute to two, from delicate nylon to abrasion-resistant Kevlar, and from a manual release lever that had to be pushed or pulled to a button typically mounted on the steering wheel that uses an air solenoid to deploy the laundry. The deployment can be done automatically, based on a wheel counter that measures rotations, but Capps still likes to choose when to drop his chutes.
“I still want to feel that I’m in control,” he says. But he admits the emergency deployment has saved him a few times. “A Funny Car, you are constantly steering it. It’s out of control from the start, and you are just trying to get it to the finish. So if a cylinder goes out, that will move you over six feet in a split second, and you’re turning the wheel to get to the finish line straight, and then you’ve somehow got to get your thumb over to the button. So then I’m glad to have help. There’s no worse feeling than when the chutes don’t come out. I have nightmares about it.”
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