Nitrous

Thanks for the response and the insight all, oh and remember surf green wagon with big blue bottle in the back!

 

I'm very familiar with Nitrous Oxide Injection having spent a lot of time developing our own system and running others.
The Germans during WWII were the first to use Nitrous Oxide Injection on their fighter planes and when one was shot down and the American and British dissembled the engine they found the system. It was copied and installed on the P51 -9 Packard Rolls V12 engines and used in areal combat; read Chuck Yeager's account. After the war the Allison and Packard Rolls engines were sold surplus for as little as $100.00 each and used in Unlimited Hydroplanes. It wasn't until the early 1960 that Nitrous Oxide Injection was used in any form of racing and that was in hydroplanes.

Rolls-Royce Merlin Power Enhancements​

The 1962-65 Miss Bardahl set the standard for Unlimited Hydroplane racing for years to come. This is especially true in regards to horsepower increases from the teams' Rolls-Royce Merlin Engines. The Miss Bardahl team was the first (along with the Miss Exide) to introduce Nitrous-Oxide Injection into motor sports racing. NOx is now common in almost all forms of motor racing as a known power improvement.

The Miss Bardahl team also introduced Water-Alcohol Injection (although the Miss Thriftway team had previously used primitive water injection), used to suppress detonation at high power settings. The combination of these two systems (along with many structural modifications) allowed for well over 3,000 HP and set the trend for years to come in boat racing. Truly, one of the team's secret weapons was technical innovation.

The basis for these systems came from the University of Washington's Engineering Library. Crew member Dixon Smith was a UW Physics major at that time. His research led him to NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics - predecessor to NASA) reports written during WWII regarding performance increases for airplane engines.

Ollie Bardahl gave Leo Vandenberg, Jerry Zuvich and young Dixon Smith a free hand when it came to the design and development of the Nitrous Oxide Injection for the Miss Bardahl. They developed the nozzles,and pressure regulators that made the system work, and figured out the amount of N2O to gas ratios so that the engines didn't blow up.

Miss Bardahl (left) and Miss Exide drag racing down the straight.

Note black plumes from both boats. This indicates a very rich mixture, which occurs when Nitrous Oxide is injected into the engine for a performance boost. Bardahl and Exide were the first to use Nitrous (in 1964). Courtesy of Roger Newton.










I didn't come into the picture until 1970's when I purchased the Miss Bardahl and became good friends with Leo Vandenberg the crew chief and the secrets of the NOS Injection system were told to me. In the early 1970's a few company's came out with their NOS set ups. The name NOS was trademarked and used by one company that I did a lot of buisness with over the years, but the name NOS even though it's trademarked had been and is used as a reference when talking about Nitrous Oxide Injection. I also was involved with a company called Land and Sea and we developed our own set up that I used in my hydroplanes running Chevy engines. By the mid 1970's NOS was used in all kinds of motor sports and as time went by it was outlawed or banned in some.
Thirty five years ago we spent a lot of time working on, tuning and racing using Nitrous Oxide Injection; and the stuff works.
Johnny Sweet