Just added up the costs for my very minimal nitrous installation. If I bought all the stuff from Summit today, it would cost me $940 to set up my car the way I have it right now, as it runs, with an NOS Cheater kit set with factory 250hp jetting. Bottles are shipped empty now, so add whatever the local cost is to fill it these days.
At that amount, for a really basic hillbilly setup, you can see why some guys that spent $10,000 on an engine to run mid 12s get all butt hurt when a rusty piece of **** like mine runs 11.80s with nitrous on a $3,000 engine.
Now, on stuck solenoids "blowing up engines" as people keep saying. How many guys admit they made a tuning error that melted their pistons, regardless if they run nitrous, turbo, supercharger, or naturally aspirated? Very few. They all blame component. Not saying it does not happen, like the one guy here that did have a wastegate failure cause his damage. I had a stuck nitrous solenoid once. What happened? Nothing but loss of power. The nitrous side solenoid failed to open and the system went pig rich on activation, nosing over. No damage. I have seen nistrous backfires in other cars a few times at start up, likely causing by leaking or stuck open nitrous solenoids. At 250hp level it usually just damages the carb butterflies.
Let's say a guy has $30,000 in an engine, not counting nitrous setup expenses. He misses the tune or has a solenoid failures and somehow melts all 8 pistons and spark plugs. I never saw every piston get damaged, but let's say that for now. How much does a new set of pistons and rings, full gaskets, spark plugs, machine shop labor cost to rebuild that engine? Probably not the $10,000 that so many claim to have in parts damage from a stuck solenoid. Even if a really expensive sheet metal tunnel ram intake and two carbs got damage are we just approaching that amazing $10,000 mark, but that is on a really high end setup, and that would often have burst panels in the intake to prevent the intake damage.
As for claims that nitrous is cheating no matter what, like steroids. Why? Why is not cheating to race someone and not tell them all your internal engine modifications and camshaft specs before the race? Why is it not cheating to claim to have a 340 when you are really running a stroker 416, or whatever? Why is not cheating to race someone and not tell them you have really nice professionally ported cylinder heads, instead of unmodified factory castings?
Really this all boils down to "who cares" in the big scheme of things. Some will always like it. Some will always hate it for no real reason, or maybe even for a specific reason. But it is pretty nice to be able to have a REAL mild or near stock, streetable, mid 13 second car, for example, and when you want to run a mid to high 11 second run for the heck of it, just back down the timing, add more octane to the fuel, and turn the kit on. Sounds fun to me.
