Back to the Future

Fuel injection is, for NASCAR, a big leap forward. Up to now, the cars have been carbureted.

The last car made in this country with a carburetor and not fuel injection was in the 1980s, and while I love the '80s, being a child of that decade, there's a bit of technology that has come down the pike since then.

In 2000, the American Speed Association used fuel-injected LS1 engines from General Motors as its spec engine, complete with fuel injection and the accompanying engine control unit.

The ECU is basically a computer module that regulates the system, making sure the loop is closed and the injectors are squirting in fuel to go with the air that is needed for spark plugs to ignite and push the pistons down.

Essentially, an engine is a big air pump. It sucks air in through a plenum, forces it down through the manifold to the compustion chamber, where it is combined with fuel and ignited. Hence the name, internal combustion.

Fuel injection, the way it is used here, gets the fuel there via fuel hoses from a tube at the top of the engine rather than a fuel line from the tank to the carburetor.

The carb would fire fuel through jets to the cylinder bores, where it would then be ignited.

One big difference for fuel injection is, the fuel pumps exist inside the fuel tanks, or at least they did in the ASA version. The system is pressurized at a much higher psi reading than the old carbureted system was.

That's basically what NASCAR is doing...changing 1940s tech for something out of the late 20th century. We'll have more updates on the system as it goes forward.