NHRA - National Hot Rod Association

SAMTech.edu Factory Stock Showdown returns to the drag strip at the AAA Insurance NHRA Midwest Nationals and we've got an exclusive look under the hood of one of Don Schumacher Racing's Dodge Challengers.

Mark Pawuk will battle for the Wally alongside Leah Pritchett and you can take a look under the hood of his Challenger in this video, which gives you some insight into the 3D scanner technology being used by the NHRA Tech Department. 

Transcript: "So we're here today with a Factory Stock Showdown car. One of the things we're going to be doing is taking this 3Dscanning system from and look at how can we analyze how much air needs to be going into this engine and into the throttle body. And what we're doing is taking some laser grids over the part. And that's going to pick up some 3D points. And those 3D points can be transferred into a mesh, which we can measure and get some specific geometry structure.

"One thing that is interesting about these pieces is air intake. There's a lot of parts and components going on inside the engine compartment. So, there has to be an engineered way to get the standard air intake for Factory Stock into this throttle body. So, we're going to be moving around radiators and other pipes and fittings and connectors.

"We've taken this air intake outside of the front end of the car, and we'll be able to scan the peace and then digitally put it back in and see where we have to work around all those parts. We'll also be able to take the sections of the intake in the throttle body size to see how much air we're taking in from the front end and we'll be compressing it down into that throttle body. After we've collected that scan data, we can then pull it into another software. So we went from 225 square inches down to 18 and a half into that throttle body."