Drive By Wire

[Chad Rhodes]

Originally Posted by Ed Wright

Larry, you are mistaken about taking power out effecting 60' times. If you use an MSD Digital 7 Programable box you simply back up the timing in the upper gears. That way there is also no effect on your lights, like a lot of weight would. You can do that to older carbureted cars also. No rocket science involved.

Ed is correct. Even a carb car could have a Digital 7 (not a 7531) and adjust timing either by time or in each gear. can also pull it out at the hit to prevent tire spin ( not traction control like the 7531 box which has a slew rate rev limiter). All of this control over timing is available to the carbureted cars, as well as the EFI cars, just different ways of doing it. NHRA does need to police the MSDs as it would not be hard to disguise a 7531 as a 7530 box, and I guarantee that you could make a car repeat within several thousandths with one if you were willing to slow it down in the process. The best way to police them would be to have a laptop in tech and plug into everyone's digital box. It will pull up the model number, the cases are so near identical that it would be easy to either swap cases ,or just the decals

[Pat Cook]

With a drive by wire system, this is very doable. But to make it accurate the car would need some sort of a real time feed back to track the car as it progress down track. GPS would work, they are getting faster all the time, but what most automotive company's use for brake testing is a optical sensor that bounce's light of the pavement (they use to use a fifth wheel for this input) and the programing for this kind of a system would not be that complicated.....

That being said, in my humble opinion......just by the win column on the new cars that are using drive by wire.....it doesn't appear that anybody is using it. maybe Nitro Joe could shed a little light on the stats for new cars winning rounds or races