No! Nitrous is a power adder. Peroid. Horsepower is horsepower. Why does it matter how you obtain the numbers?
Steve,
I respect your position, however, if you are allowing nitrous, why are you restricting it to a roots-type blower then? Excluding whipples is excluding power adders. What about turbos as power adders, extra displacement and more cylinders? They all make more power also. Please inform me if I'm missing the point here.
Don't forget that not everyone is honest when it comes to NOS. It is easily hidden from those who really know what they are looking for. If someone chooses to be sneaky about it, there is no way "us" to subject the car to inspection before accepting the numbers. Then there are those who have NOS installed but say they just didn't use it on the dyno. Just food for thought. The list will hold no value if it's too easy to submit false numbers and create an unfair playing field
You are absolutely right, Wayne. All I can hope is that we are educated enough on what level of performance coincides with what modifications, and we can judge accurately what numbers are truly "skewed", or unexplainable without the use of nitrous.
I personaly don't want to see the dyno turn into a game of "who has the guts to add more nitrous". Or, "my motor blew up on the dyno with a 250 shot, but it made 480 RWHP just before that, so add me to the list!". Part of having such a list is knowing what modifications it took to achieve what level of power. If you add NOS to the equation, how can you tell what is making the power, the combination of performance parts, or how big the nozzle was?
That's the only reason I'm against NOS on the dyno, even though I do intend to run NOS in the future, both on the street and at the track. I will likely see what it does on the dyno just for fun, but I will hardly consider a NOS powered dyno run to be any achievement worth submitting to a ranked list, or worth bragging about.
The TBU dyno list went the NOS route, and unfortunately (although I don't mean to critisize the TBU, since it serves a different purpose) when you read the list, you have no idea what Gary, Dave or Chris ran without NOS, or what the current power level is when not using NOS. For that reason, the list becomes a "I wonder how much NOS it took to get the HP", rather than, "I wonder what modifications he has". I just don't want to see the dyno list become a NOS competition, rather than a true representation of a person's current power level.
At the track, using NOS is part of the racing environment. You are racing against the clock, or competiting with other racers. In that setting, I feel the use of NOS is more acceptable as a racing tool, because it depends when you turn it on, for how long, and during what gears that determines how successful you are. On the dyno, spraying until the chart peaks at a certain number seems kind of silly, unless you are just doing it out of curiousity. I guess what it all comes down to is, I look at the dyno list as a factual representation, rather than a competition. Since 1/4 miles racing combines skill, HP and overall set-up of the car, it is obviously more competitive in nature. The dyno numbers are more a documentation of people's results, that we happpen to rank in order from highest to lowest, which makes it easier to read, and a lot more fun and interesting.
Again, this is only my opinion.