Nitrous oxide is the power-adder that numerous gearheads first played with when they were trying to add horsepower to their ride. It’s cheap, can be added to any engine, and will make anything a lot more fun to drive. Racers have taken the use of nitrous to unprecedented levels, and there’s an art to using it when you’re going really fast.
One of the great things about using nitrous is it teaches you how to properly approach a tune-up. You can’t simply throw all the giggle juice at the engine right off the bat, unless you want to hang a set of rods out of your oil pan. Nitrous forces racers to use a solid process of seeing what the engine needs and likes as they try to add more to go faster.
Now, when you really step things up from just a little 200 shot of nitrous, things get interesting. The stakes are even higher and you have to understand how to balance fuel, air, spark, and nitrous to keep the engine happy. Racers who are spraying large amounts of nitrous spend a lot of time after a run just going over data to see what the engine is telling them before they try to add any more nitrous to the equation.
Ron Rhodes is one of the best to ever race on a set of Mickey Thompson radial tires. His iconic nitrous-fed red Camaro has countless win lights under its belt, and that’s thanks to Rhodes understanding of how to tune a nitrous combination. We caught up with Ron at South Georgia Motorsports Park and he covered what goes into building and tuning one of these big horsepower nitrous engines.