Nitrous oxide is still a widely used power-adder that can be found at all levels of drag racing. You need to have a power management strategy if you’re going to use nitrous, and that usually involves some type of progressive controller. If you control your vehicle with a FuelTech ECU and use nitrous you’re in luck, as FuelTech’s software has a built-in nitrous controller you can use.

A nitrous system uses a progressive controller to help “ramp” in the nitrous so the additional power can be managed. If you just sprayed a full hit of nitrous right away there will be negative consequences up to and including, a loss of traction, or a very unhappy engine. When you’ve set up a progressive system properly it allows you to lower your elapsed times and get the most out of your nitrous system.

Nitrous progressive controllers come in all shapes and sizes with different levels of functionality, but they’re usually something that you need to wire in as an additional piece of electronics. The FuelTech nitrous progressive controller is great because it’s integrated into the FTManager software. Since the progressive controller is a part of the software, you don’t have to add anything significant to your vehicle’s wiring.

In this video from FuelTech, Cameron Lohrmann goes over the basics of how to set up the progressive nitrous controller within the FTManager software. Lohrmann shows you how to configure the inputs and outputs for the progressive system so everything will be activated when the system is armed. FuelTech has given users three options to run the progressive controller; by RPM, speed, or time. Lohrmann uses time as the example in this video and walks you through the entire process.

You can learn more about all the options FuelTech’s ECUs have right here on the company’s website.