Video: Demonstrating a 5,000 Horsepower Shot of Nitrous

Massive horsepower release is the best kind of foggy weather.

What does 5,000 horsepower look like? Well, we’ve seen a few examples over time. NHRA Top Fuel and Funny Car engines put out considerably more than 5,000 ponies and the Steve Morris Engines quad-turbo V16 already makes more than 4,500 horsepower, on its way toward 5,000. But if you need another visualization, here’s a trade show demonstration of what a 5,000-shot of nitrous would look like. It looks a bit foggy and cold for people, but a nitrous-ready engine will be happy for a small percentage of that release.

Nitrous Express has the setup at what looks like the Performance Racing Industry (PRI) Trade Show in Indianapolis from 2015. The nitrous fogs out the entire booth for seven full seconds, unleashing 5,000 horsepower worth of N2O into the air and leaving some ice crystals all around. Now, it’s unlikely anybody’s going to dump that much horsepower into an engine unless they have their own personal space program to collect the connecting rods from orbit after trying. That said, trade shows are kind of built around demonstrating these kinds of extremes.

You might notice AZN’s “Dung Beetle” from Street Outlaws behind the nitrous demonstration. If you’re not famliar with the show or are generally curious, that’s an extremely weathered 1966 Volkswagen Beetle. Underneath the crusty body panels hides a monster of an air-cooled 2.3-liter engine fed with a turbocharger and an E85 fuel-injection setup with a water/methanol injection system that Nitrous Express makes (They do more than just nitrous). That’s all good for 438 horsepower to the wheels and a few match-race wins.

Besides blasting the Volkswagen engine into a few hundred pieces, we wonder what a 5,000-horsepower shot of nitrous would do to the rear-engined Beetle. Actual takeoff? Backflips? Four-second passes?