All of my times were in the .27 to .33 range. It's an interesting
exercise, but really doesn't correlate to a good drag strip reaction time.
With a typical bracket tree you've got 3 ambers worth of notice before a
green. You just have to adjust for your natural reflexes and for the
"reaction time" of your truck, rollout distance etc. Did anyone try
different colors to see how it changed your times? Typically reactions
times are quicker at the track after sunset due to the contrast on the
tree.
I've got a practice tree at home and have spent more hours than I care to
admit on the Hot Rod Burnout Drag Strip Simulator (for PC) working on my
reaction time, top end tactics etc. I would recommend either to anybody
serious about bracket racing. The average of my reaction times over an
hour or so (100+ runs) on the practice tree is usually in the .530 (.500
being perfect). The machine throws out the redlights when calculating
this. I redlight about 1 in every 20 times. The tree allows you to put in
a delay (rollout etc.) from the time you hit the gas (or release transbrake
switch) until vehicle breaks beam. I run mine at .400.
I don't get to the track very often (3-4 times a season), but I find that
the only thing better than setting a new best E.T. with your vehicle is
cutting a great light in a practice session against a quicker vehicle and
beating them to the finish line. I went on a "High School Drag" night
(which is also a test and tune night) last summer and holeshot a young man
in what he thought was a pretty bad 5.0. After he got holeshot, he
proceeded to smoke the tires which killed his 60 ft time. By the time he
got his act together, I was long gone. He came flying by me about 100 feet
past the finish line a little perturbed to have been smoked by a pickup.
His e.t. was 7/10's of a second better than mine and would have been better
yet had he not gotten carried away with the throtte of the line. I could
see his friends giving him a hard time later on. To his credit, he kept at
it and was improving throughout the night.
Sorry for the lengthy post, probably more than you ever wanted to know
about my observations on this. That's why god (or was it IBM) made the
delete key for...right?
Dave Rench
1997 Dakota 2WD RC 5.2 Auto
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Jun 20 2003 - 12:12:32 EDT