Anybody running one? Are they that much better then the standard?

I have Stroud spring launchers they will deploy 99.99999999999 percent of the time . Air launchers work great but you cant beat the dependability of a spring. Anything that holds pressure has the potential to leak and cause failure ( that failure would be that the chutes do no deploy and you drive off into the sunset or something not as pretty )

I have a freind who uses one and he said it was much faster than one with a pilot chute. He runs all year on one small co2 bottle and it has always worked fine. One thing to remember is if by some chance someone hangs their pants on the cable and your chute pops out in the lanes you better have the tools to reset a spring launcher with you, with a air launcher its just a flip of a switch and no tools.

Use a spring. Not somewhere you want a failure or a leak, etc. A guy I know had one fail after working perfectly in the pits when he tested it, dropped the 'chutes under the wheelie bars and stuffed the car into the wall and rolled it.

I dont know of OR use any special tools to load my
chute with(cable operated spring launcher)... the air
launchers are nice but I have seen them fail... never
seen a cable operated fail(once the cable length was
set correctly

I thought about this also. I will likely go to a spring launcher when I upgrade. They are much faster to deploy and I feel a requirement on fast cars on some of these 1/8th mile tracks here in North Texas. Just not alot of shutdown area.