Delay Box - History

History

Delay boxes began appearing in drag race cars in the 1980s. The early units were timers in a sheet metal box with an analog potentiometer and lock nut to establish a setpoint with no readout or feedback to the driver. These early units used a resistor / capacitor charging scheme to trigger a unijunction transistor to release an electromechanical relay. Such drag racing delay timers are very crude by today's standards. Nolen (IKE) Hamma is credited with introducing such early devices to drag racing. (currently DBA as Digital Delay, INC.) Ike Hamma is deceased. His family is assigned a patent for a type of delay timer, his son Charlie Hamma is the current president of Digital Delay Inc., a manufacturer of drag racing timers. Other entities contributed to delay box technology and also have Intellectual Property. Some of these other entities have delay box patents (Reid and Furrow), some entities did not pursue patents for their inventions even though their inventions may have predated those of known patent holders.

In the late 1980s units began appearing in the marketplace that were digital in nature rendering the analog, unijunction, R/C timer design obsolete.

The new digital delay box timers used decimal or binary coded decimal thumbwheel switches to set countdown timer values in digital logic. The thumbwheels also fed back a visual numerical value that the race car driver could use to help him calculate proper settings. A popular early digital unit of this type was designed and produced by Robert Furrow (B. F. Electronics of Weatherford, Oklahoma). Robert Furrow's delay box utilized a quartz crystal for timing accuracy and Transistor–transistor logic (TTL) integrated circuits. Furrow's digital delay box was a substantial improvement in accuracy and ergonomics but suffered in reliability. In the United States many B.F. Electronics delay timers were sold Nationwide.

Shortly thereafter the first microprocessor based delay box timer was introduced by Richard Beutnagel (Thorn Microsystems in Rochester, NY). Richard Beutnagel's design also used a quartz crystal time base for accuracy but without the TTL glue logic. The Thorn Microsystems unit utilized a single chip microcomputer from Intel, a professionally fabricated double sided printed circuit board with plated through holes, large BCD thumbwheel switches, and rugged solid state bipolar output circuitry (no electromechanical relay). The Thorn Microsystems design reduced parts count to "one chip" and one power transistor substantially reduced PCB (printed circuit board) solder interconnections for a significant enhancement in reliability. The firmware embedded within the Intel microcontroller chip performed all the timing and control functions required of the delay box with quartz crystal digital accuracy.

Many new TTL and CMOS glue logic designs continued appearing on the market for several more years. Names like Meziere, Terminator, K&R, ATI, Digital Delay (Ike Hamma), Biondo, Davis, D&D (Danny Duberry) and others figure prominently in the history of drag racing delay boxes. Some of the glue logic type designs had large LED (light emitting diode) readouts to display the timer setting, others featured attractive backlighted LCDs (liquid crystal displays), still others used thumbwheels of varying size and quality. All delay boxes on the market were quartz crystal accurate by the year 1990. Several years elapsed before other delay box designs appeared with embedded microprocessors.

Today, virtually all drag race delay boxes are microprocessor based with intelligent, backlit LCD readouts. The most popular models feature internal crossover time computation (allowing a driver to pick a visual cue from his opponents side of the Christmas tree, the delay box internally does simple math computations for the driver), bump up and bump down compensation (allows a driver to easily make small plus or minus timing adjustments quickly and remotely), crossover compensation (an offset time the driver can set when crossing over), safety interlock (prevents delay box from reactivating once the race car is in motion, a valuable feature), bypass (a feature where the delay box is deactivated before it can finish counting down, thus launching the car immediately), and other features.