If your carb rules are open, a Demon carburetor may give you the tuning advantage you are looking for
Barry Grant's Demon line of carbs offer many tuning options that can help you controlwheelspin and makespeed on the track.
As stock car racers, we often fall into the trap of believing that as long as the engine idles and runs at full throttle, the carburetor is giving us all it's capable of. The reason cannot be a fear of complexity-not compared to the problems of determining roll centers or measuring dynamic caster gain, which most racers handle with no problem. For some of us, it's because we concentrate solely on tuning the suspension and leave everything between the air cleaner and the oil pan to the engine builder. For others, it may be because we've given a custom carburetor builder $3,000 to tweak a stock carburetor within an inch of its life, and now we are afraid to touch it.
Regardless of the reason, if you fall into this category, you may be missing out on the track. When tuned properly, a carburetor can be used to help control how fast the engine puts the power to the rear wheels and, in essence, becomes a legal traction device. This is true regardless of what brand you are using.
Many racers do not use a positive stop connected to the throttle pedal and instead depend on the carburetor's positive stop. The standard method is to connect the stop to the throttle shaft, and too much force from the driver's foot can cause it to bend or the welds to break. Although a positive stop on the pedal is definitely recommended, Demon strengthened this area by making the throttle stop part of the primary and secondary linkages so that no damaging twisting forces are exerted on the throttle shaft.
According to Barry Grant's Doug Schriefer, tunability is the key: "If you race the same track every week, and your setup is pretty good at getting you through the corners, but you are getting too much wheelspin, it doesn't make sense to start automatically swapping shocks and springs. If your setup is good, then leave it. Let me help you control the wheelspin coming off the corners with the carburetor."
Since it began manufacturing its own line of performance carburetors in the early '90s, Barry Grant has concentrated on giving the racer lots of tuning options in its line of Demon carburetors that can be performed easily and quickly. Granted, many circle track stock car divisions require a specific Holley part number, but if your track or division has no restriction on the brand of carb you can run, a Demon carburetor should at least be considered.
Because it shares most of its basic architecture with a Holley carb, a Demon isn't an alien piece of technology for most racers. We're still talking about boosters, venturis, float bowls, and throttle plates in all the positions you would expect. The differences are finer, but they may turn out to be quite important to you on the track and in the pits.