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Hughes Performance builds transmissions and converters for almost anything you can imagine, but they’re perhaps best know for their drag racing products that hav won countless races and championships and notched just as many elapsed time and speed records over the years. In their converter lineup, the Hughes team has an array of units for all sorts of engine, power adder, and transmission combinations, such as the 7 and 10-inch weld-together converters that hughes’ Pete Nichols showed us around here at PRI.
The 10-inch model is part of Hughes’ Heads-Up series of drag racing torque converters, sporting a billet stator and unique vain angles and vain shapes that effect how the converter provides torque multiplication. Says Nichols, “on a limited tire application, like an 8.5-inch slick or a 275 radial, it makes the car a lot easier to get off the starting line and through the front half of the track.”
Despite this, the converter still maintains excellent top end efficiency.
Hughes' 7-inch converter, weighting in at just 23-24 lbs. and designed with high stall speeds and rotating weight in mind for high-RPM drag race engines.
The smaller 7-inch converter, as you may have guessed, is designed for use on higher RPM, often naturally aspirated engines in classes like Competition Eliminator, Super Stock, Stock, the NMCA and PSCA’s N/A 10.5, and others, where less rotating mass is not just desirable, but a virtual necessity to keep everything together.
The smaller you go on the converter, the naturally higher it will typically stall, so if you have a motor that’s shifting at 9,800 RPM, it’s going to need to flash anywhere from 7,800 to 8,400 RPM when you launch the car so it can stay within the power band. – Pete Nichols
The 7-inch converter, as Nichols shared with us, comes in at around 23-24 pounds, while the larger converters, like the 10-inch, can range from the upper 30’s to lower 40’s, offering a significant difference in rotating weight and parasitic horsepower loss.
As Nichols shares with us, “the smaller you go on the converter, the naturally higher it will typically stall, so if you have a motor that’s shifting at 9,800 RPM, it’s going to need to flash anywhere from 7,800 to 8,400 RPM when you launch the car so it can stay within the power band.”
Hughes has designed this converter with unique stator and impeller fin design to get the flash stall up, get the car accelerating, and achieve an efficient fluid coupling going down the race track.
For more information on Hughes Performance and their extensive line of drivelive components, visit them on the web at hughesperformance.com.
