Sports Compacts at Moroso

Words and photos by Adam Cranmer

What comes to mind when thinking of drag racing? Most likely 4-second passes at 300 mph by blown, nitro-burning funny cars or dragsters. How about front wheel driver versus rear wheel drive, nitrous injected, turbo boosted, alcohol and gasoline burning 4 cylinder, 6 cylinder and rotary powered import and sport compact cars mixing it up in bracket and heads-up racing? Drag racing? Hey, it's the new millennium and there's a new breed of "muscle" cars out there.

The Winter Showdown held Dec. 8-9 at Moroso Motorsports Park sent enough compacts down the track to satisfy any true fan of bracket racing.

For the heads-up drag racing fans, there were Super Quick and Pro Outlaw classes. Both included 9-second, nearly 150-mph cars.

The Super Quick champion was Steven Thomson and his 2000 Honda. In the final, Thomson ran 9.877/141.08 against the 10.692/122.23 pass of Leon Monerrat's '91 Mitsubishi. The quickest pass was 9.287 by Carlos Gonzalez's '73 Mazda.

In Pro Outlaw, Papo Martinez's '70 R-100 (above right) was quickest with a 9.199-second run, but Hector Garcia's '73 Mazda (above left) won the event with a 9.886/142.69 defeat of Michael Ventura (photo below).

Joe Rosado took the Super Comp trophy home with a 14.572/87.64 in his '89 Honda CRX against Dwayne Lopez's '82 Toyota 14.271/82.06. The quickest run in the class went to the '74 VW of James Shay with a 13.189 pass.

Juan Santiago's sharp '71 Datsun lost in the first round.