The Dragster is a modified automobile, purpose built for Drag Racing. It can be a heavily modified already existent vehicle, or it can be custom made according to race specifications.

Drag racing is a parallel sprint race, for a distance of 300 meters, the classical "quarter mile." These supercars can accelerate from 0 to 60 mph (0-100 km/h) in 1 second, before rapidly breaking. The whole race takes about 5-6 seconds. The driver who crosses the finish line first wins and goes on to the next round.

It's considered to be so spectacular that it has tens of thousands of fans, in the US and Canada, but it also has spread around the world, out to Australia, New Zealand, Japan, the Caribbean in particular Aruba, Mexico, Greece, Malta, South Africa and most European and Scandinavian countries especially Finland and Sweden.

They have huge engines that give out tremendous thrust, allowing them to achieve extremely high speed and incredible acceleration time. The competition models are classified according to engine power and displaced volume.

The biggest engines of superior class dragsters have a displacement of 12.126 cubic centimeters (740 cui). The maximum power of these monsters exceeds 2,500 hp.

In order to achieve these outstanding results, the engines burn nitromethane instead of gasoline. Nitromethane is a chemical compound similar to gasoline, only it has two extra atoms of oxygen in its molecule which greatly increase the burn. It's like gasoline that has been pre-mixed with nitrous oxide.

This top fuel gives the dragster the racing advantage, since it can get a lot more power from each explosion inside the engine by burning a lot more nitromethane in a cylinder. The final result is a lot of power for each cylinder stroke.

Thus, only by changing the fuel, the dragsters can double or even triple the engine's horsepower. This comes with a price, though, as they can burn close to a gallon (4 liters) of nitromethane per second. They don't worry about it, since the whole race takes 5-6 seconds.

The fastest top fuelers can attain terminal speeds of over 530 km/h (330 mph) while covering the quarter mile (402 m) distance in roughly 4.45 seconds.

It is said the Top Fuel dragsters are the fastest accelerating vehicles on Earth, even faster than the space shuttle during launch or a jet fighter catapulted from an aircraft carrier.