Ive seen this article before, and Im sure a few of you have as well. Still it sparked my interest, so I decided to share.



Try, for a moment, to comprehend a four-cylinder engine capable of achieving 4,000 hp at 55 psi turbo boost on nitromethane. It gets wild pretty fast. A single horsepower is defined as the ability to lift 550 lbs one foot in one second. Bob Norwood's 4,000-hp Turbo-Fuel Max-4 powerplant can lift 2.2 million lbs--1,100 tons--a foot in one second. This is about the weight of a 50-car freight train, but then again, the Max-4 has as much power as a railway locomotive. Another way to look at 4,000 hp is that the Max-4 is capable of lifting one ton straight upward 1,100 feet in a single second. Try to comprehend an engine in which every power pulse--each putt--can lift 4.4 tons upward one foot in one second. This is the type of mayhem a 4.8-liter inline four is capable of when you force-feed it air at a rate of 200 lbs per minute and pump it full of nitromethane at a rate faster than you could dump it out of a bucket. No matter how you quantify it, this is the extreme edge of high-tech performance.

Max-4 piston, rod, wrist pin, and rod cap. No pin-retainer is considered reliable enough in a Top Fuel environment; the full-floating wrist-pins are retained with aluminum spacers held in place by the cylinder walls themselves!

Click here for more: http://www.turbomagazine.com/tech/0202tur_extremeedge/