Читать книгу How to Install and Tune Nitrous Oxide Systems - Bob McClurg - Страница 11

Historically, the first high-performance automotive aftermarket retailer to introduce nitrous oxide to the automotive sector was Ron Hammel. His company, 10,000 RPM Speed Equipment, began selling nitrous in 1962.

Hammel recalls, “After moving from Spokane, Washington, to Southern California around 1958, I had worked for a number of drag racing teams including Jack Chrisman’s Howard’s Cams Special, so I kind of knew what dragster racing was all about. Around 1962–1963, I had been experimenting with nitrous oxide, and installed a small system on a Pacific Northwestern-based Top Fuel car called the Top Hat Special. The car was a good running car [before the nitrous], but it was just an average running car. Anyhow, we set Low E.T. and Top MPH during qualifying at the Bakersfield Fuel & Gas Championships, so I figured that the startling increase in performance had to be attributed to the juice.”

Energized by what had happened, Hammel went back to where he worked, Tony Capanna’s shop called Hot Rod City, and began doing development work on a series of 4-barrel-carbureted gasoline-burning engines. Then he began selling kits.

Hammel recounts, “In 1969, when the astronauts went to the moon, I told everyone, [and thought] maybe now they’ll believe how good this stuff [nitrous oxide] really is! We did a lot of engine development (dyno) work, and learned about things like air/fuel ratio [AFR]. We learned how to set up an engine while lowering the exhaust temperature so that you didn’t burn the darned thing up. Our development work even included Diesel engines. Basically, we worked at it until we got it right!”

Initially, 10,000 RPM’s N₂O kits were based on mechanical throttle linkage systems. “From about 1969 to the early 1980s we sold a lot of kits,” says Hammel. “Our first kits were all manually operated using the existing original equipment throttle linkage that came with the carburetor. We set up these mechanical systems to work at wide open throttle [WOT]. At WOT the system turned itself on. If you had anything less than WOT, the system turned itself back off.”

However, the more 10,000 RPM became involved in the sale of nitrous kits, the more it found that various compromises, such as throttle kickdowns, were being made with the factory throttle linkage, so it became necessary to switch to electrically activated solenoids, which have now become an industry standard.

Arguably, the popularization of nitrous oxide as an automotive power adder would not have experienced such rapid growth and popularity had it not been for a couple of other factors: first, the resurgence of street racing in the 1970s, due in part to the closing of a number of popular drag strips across the country; and second, the overwhelming popularity of bracket racing and its various forms—Outlaw Street Car, Street Legal Drag, World’s Fastest Street Car Competition, etc. This type of competition became a viable alternative to costly NHRA-, AHRA-, and IHRA-class racing. Of course a direct spinoff the widely accepted popularity of nitrous oxide, or so-called Throttle in a Bottle, was the establishment of a number of new nitrous-oxide-systems manufacturing companies. One of them was Compucar Nitrous Oxide Systems, founded in the early 1970s by Ron Ractoff, and later purchased by Ernest Wrenn. Another key player was Nitrous Oxide Systems, or NOS as it is widely known, co-founded in 1978 by Southern California drag racers Mike Thermos and Dale Vaznaian.