Jet Car

NHRA Drag Racing

NHRA DRAG RACING – BARRY PRESCOTT

Barry Prescott has spent a lifetime in pursuit of speed and inducted into the Greater Vancouver Motorsport Pioneers Society in 2018.

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-cart, only getting the mechanics to weld up the pieces. He had a paper route stretching miles over the countryside and delivered papers with that go-cart which could do 100 kilometres an hour. With a passion for speed, he re-geared it so it hit 110 kilometres when he was nine. Discovering the go-cart 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 license.
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 self-designed 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 multi-stage 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 all over 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 best-known 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.”

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