BORN TO BE FAST
Engine maker has spent a lifetime in pursuit of speed, acceleration
There will be a show of custom cars, hot rods and restored vehicles outside Shannon Hall on the Cloverdale Fairgrounds Saturday afternoon. Inside the hall, 16 Hall of Fame builders, racers and supporters will be honoured at the 18th annual Greater Motorsport Pioneers Society.
While others who bring their cars to the show may be lifting hoods and showing how their engines perform, Barry Prescott won’t be starting his Nighthawk race car. It’s just too violent.
If he did start the jet-powered drag racer, the heat and flame burning at more than 1,000 C would incinerate everything in its path, while the shock wave and pressure from the afterburner could knock small planes out of the sky and break windows for blocks. It would bring out the police SWAT team.
The Nighthawk is powered by a 12,000-horsepower Pratt and Whitney jet engine with an extremely aggressive afterburner that can propel this 800-kilogram machine to 460 kilometres per hour in just 5.75 seconds. That’s six times faster than an F18 fighter plane.
Prescott squeezes into a cockpit that is so narrow and small that he couldn’t bring a lunch bag. The massive jet engine occupies the entire other side of the dragster. He operates the engine manually because computers and governors would be too limiting.
He watches his pyrometer, fuel control and RPM per cent gauges as he starts the jet engine, which he will push to 109 per cent of its recommended operating speed with an aggressive afterburner making enormous pressure. The engine will self-destruct at 112 per cent.
“This machine intakes 30,000 cubic feet of air per second and will pull seven Gs,” Prescott says of its massive gravitational acceleration. “The afterburner is more than twice as violent as that of a fighter plane because it only runs for a few seconds. It burns fuel at a rate of 4.5 gallons (17 litres) per second.”
For leg protection, there is a half-inch aluminum plate running from his foot to above his knee beside the compressor section of the jet engine. He sits beside the main turbine hot section with the outer blades turning at 66,000 metres per minute.
“If they come unglued, they can saw an airplane in half. There’s no sense putting a plate in there. It will chop me to pieces if it comes apart. I don’t want to think about it.”
Coming off the line at the drag strip, the thrust is almost unimaginable. The dragster can hit 180 km/ h in less than a second.
“About mid-track, when the snout starts packing air in and it’s got some heat, it really starts hauling ass,” Prescott says.
He must shut the fuel off before the quarter-mile finish line or the dragster wouldn’t stop. National Hot Rod Association rules limit the runs to under 482 km/ h
He activates two military-grade parachutes tethered above the red-hot tail pipe so they won’t burn off. There is so much impact at -12 Gs when the chutes deploy that the front end comes off the ground for several seconds.
The Nighthawk jet-powered dragster was a world record holder for the standing quartermile, a record that has now been eclipsed.
Three years ago, Barry was involved in a spectacular crash after the dragster became airborne. Since then, it has a new frame and GM wind-tunneltested body along with numerous engineering improvements. Barry will certify the rebuilt Nighthawk once an NHRAmandated “dead man” automatic shutdown system is installed.
He will once again chase the world speed record in his class and compete at sanctioned events throughout the U.S.
So just who is Barry Prescott? He was raised by a single mother in the back of his grandparents’ general store in the tiny hamlet of Dewdney, east of Mission. From his earliest years he hung around the logging truck repair shop across the highway.
At age eight he designed and built a go-kart, only getting the mechanics to weld up the pieces. He had a paper route stretching miles over the countryside and delivered papers with that gokart, which could do 100 km/ h. With a passion for speed, he regeared it so it hit 110 kilometres when he was nine. Discovering the go-kart was no good in the snow, he built his own motorized mini bike to deliver The Vancouver Sun, after dark in winter.
He rebuilt his uncle’s dishwasher at nine and just kept on fixing things and building machines from scratch. In Grade 7, he received a provincial science award for building a combination electric motor/generator from his own design. By 13, he was doing his paper route in a 1951 Ford purchased with money from picking berries, the first of a series of cars bought and driven before he was old enough to get a licence.
At 15, he was building rocket motors powered with solid fuel cooked on his mother’s stove, which almost resulted in the house burning down. By the following year he was working evenings and weekends in a plywood mill and became a top street-racing contender in the Vancouver area with a series of super stock muscle cars that he would tune to the max with selfdesigned nitrous oxide systems.
As one of the first to power performance engines with nitrous oxide, his systems were sold by speed shops all over B.C. He went on to design multistage nitrous systems for blown alcohol engines competing in the unlimited drag racing classes in the U.S.
Opening Prescott Racing, he began building engines for dragsters, drag boats and for tractor pulls across North America. He got around the single-carburetor racing rule by doubling the size of a Dominator carburetor. He sawed it in half and stretched it out. Then he designed his own top performance injection systems for top fuel and alcohol competition boats and dragsters. He was soon building horsepower for some of America’s bestknown racers.
In 1998, after going through the rule book for top fuel Harley-Davidson motorcycle drag racing, he designed a new engine that broke all the records and is still the one to beat. He followed that up with a revolutionary ignition system that packed even more power into racing because it could burn more fuel.
“Most guys including the engineers use computer programs. I only use a calculator to figure things out because computer programs have limits,” he says. “Burn rates, coefficients, parasitic losses, piston and valve acceleration values are simple mathematics. Nobody tells me changes won’t work. I design it so it will work.”
Prescott and other pioneers ■ will be inducted by the Greater Vancouver Motorsport Pioneers Society in a ceremony open to everyone Saturday on the Cloverdale Fairgrounds.