impressive, but as I've witnessed a top fuel dragster do 0-320mph in just over 3 seconds (meters away from me!), think I am a bit desensitised.
I've seen Ford make a similarly fast electric mustang-chassis dragster, and yeah, that's a bit... unsurprising, really? You know how much force you need, ergo how much torque, translating that into a motor is not hard, translating that into a current is not hard, translating that into cabling is not hard. It's much more a set of composable sub-problems, and unlike engines, most of those sub-problems can't explode.
That’s because electric motors can be as high as 98-99% efficient at converting electric power into work while small internal combustion engines peak out at about 35% and that’s generous. 20% is more typical. Then for ICE you have additional losses in the transmission that don’t happen for electric.
The vast majority of the energy in liquid fuel heats the air around the car.
This is also why a normal sized EV powered entirely by coal fired electricity can emit less carbon per mile than an efficient ICE car or even a hybrid. A big supercritical steam turbine in a coal power plant is going to be well over twice as efficient at converting heat into useful work than a small ICE. (Few people get all their power from coal, which is the worst case for CO2 emission, so in practice EVs are pretty much always lower carbon.)
Small heat engines suck.
"only" is doing a lot of work here, current lithium batteries are under 1 MJ/kg while good ol car gasoline is at 40+ MJ/kg
top fuel dragsters run nitromethane which is 4 times less energy dense than regular gas yet the go much faster so clearly there is much more going on than just energy density, like the fact that they have to entirely rebuild their engine every other day. I don't even think energy density is a big deal, it's more about how fast you can convert it into movement, and explosions are very good at that type of large scale conversion
Top fuel engines are torn down and rebuilt between runs.
A drag racer doesn't need range, so storing a large volume of energy probably isn't the problem. But having enough batteries to supply enough amperage to get that kind of acceleration is probably adding too much weight to be competitive.
This is also the problem with battery powered aviation. The majority of the energy used in a flight is on takeoff and ascent, effectively lifting all that mass to cruising altitude.
in fact it only needs 1/4 of a mile!
https://www.dailynews.com/2013/11/09/nhra-debate-rages-on-10...
Talks about runoff space at smaller venues, tires, insurance, etc
That's an exaggeration or a misstatement. Even flying the shortest possible flight (a single takeoff and climb, followed by a descent and landing at a very nearby airport) is overwhelmingly likely to use more total energy in the taxi, cruise, descent, landing, and taxi portions. I looked through some of my datalogs from flights where I flew circuits back to the same airport and the fuel (energy) used for a takeoff and climb to pattern altitude was only rarely more than the fuel used for the rest of the circuit, and that was only when practicing emergency turnbacks from a simulated loss of thrust on takeoff.
The peak power is used on takeoff, but the majority of energy is used in cruise.
For drag, the limit is more likely to be power density rather than energy density (same reason why more energy dense gasoline isn't used in top-fuel; the limiting power factor for a typical ICE is the amount of air you can get in the cylinder and you get about double the power with nitromethane vs gasoline for a fixed amount of oxygen).
[edit]
The power you can get with nitromethane is only double if you run stochiometric; since it is partially self-oxidizing, running richer lets you get even more power (sources seem to indicate 4x). Of course running rich lowers the efficiency even more.
It was more like an explosion than a car accelerating. Suddenly a ton of noise you could feel in your chest and then it's gone.
P.S. You could always stop by the pits and ask them to re-torque the bolts :-D