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Transmissions that are built for drag racing are different from those designed for other motorsports and everyday use. Not only are they designed to withstand much higher stresses through extreme amounts of horsepower and torque, they\u2019re designed with a different purpose in mind. The same can be said of rear-ends or differentials. Drag racing diffs have to handle tresses and they have to perform their job in a way similar to those installed in your grocery-getter, but they are designed to do it differently. We’ll go over the types of transmissions and what your ride needs to perform as well as possible.<\/p>\n
Drag Racing Transmissions and Rear-Ends Need to Deliver Power Early<\/strong><\/p>\n Your daily driver-grocery-getter car, even if it\u2019s a high performance Camaro or Corvette, has different needs than a drag racer. Sure, you may enjoy hitting it light to light, but you also have to have smooth and controllable acceleration, decent gas mileage, and a decent engine RPM when cruising around town and on the highway. Your typical NASCAR racer has pretty similar needs-controllable acceleration (no tire spin), decent mileage (can\u2019t hit the pits every few laps for gas), and it needs to keep the engine in the RPM-band where it\u2019s producing max horsepower.<\/p>\n Your typical strip burner, heck, any drag racer, is very different. You want everything the engine produces translated to those big slicks right now, not when the engine hits max RPM. You don\u2019t mind some tire spin right at launch, because that heats the tires up and gets them hooked up quicker once you\u2019re out of the launch box, and gas mileage?\u00a0 HAH!<\/p>\n Older drag racing transmissions were a combination of two- and four-speed manuals. There really wasn\u2019t enough time in the run for more and shifting is a weak point, a chance to mess up and lose, or blow your engine, so we tried to minimize the of shifts. These days some racers still use two-speed manuals, but now we\u2019re seeing more and more guys going with automatics like ATI\u2019s SuperGlide4<\/a><\/strong>. It\u2019s an automatic, but it\u2019s used like a manual.<\/p>\n As drag racers, we build our engines to produce the maximum horsepower and torque early in the torque band and then drop off pretty quickly. Guys like Jimmie Johnson and Jeff Gordon over in NASCAR have engines designed to produce more at the upper reaches of the torque band. Because we need our torque delivered to the ground quicker, we need what are known as \u201ctaller gears\u201d or a lower ratio. Back when I was turning times at the track, we were using rear-ends with 4.11s and maybe 4.56s. Today it isn\u2019t strange to see 5.13s and 5.38s.<\/p>\n Manual or Automatic?<\/strong><\/p>\n If you\u2019d asked me twenty or so years ago what kind of transmission I would recommend for a strip burning drag racer, I\u2019d have probably pulled out the receipts for the transmissions I had built for me-3 speed manual clutchless from Muncie. There was just no way I\u2019d recommend an automatic transmission for a drag racer back then. They couldn\u2019t handle the torque and horsepower we were putting out. Another reason was that there too much torque lost in the torque converter.<\/p>\n