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The importance of acceleration is proportional to the distance from the starting line. The more effort you can put forth at the beginning, the more result you'll get from that effort as far as ET goes. Put it this way: If you had a car that put out 600 hp for the first half of the track and 50 hp for the second half of the track, it would get MUCH better ETs than if you put out 50 hp for the first half of the track and 600 HP for the second half of the track. In both cases, the average HP output of the run would be the same, but you got more result from your effort by putting out the 600 hp at the beginning. The reason for this is that once you've accelerated, you can still cover a lot of distance quickly by coasting. At 100 mph you don't need a lot of power to maintain that speed. So if you could just get up to speed quickly then coast, you'll still get a good ET. In the case of the top fuel dragsters, they're putting out over 6,000 hp and have very sticky tires, so they're already travelling over 60 mph in about half a second, and they're going almost 100 mph by 1 second. Coasting the rest of the track at nearly 100 will still get you a good ET.
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