On the next run everything went right: a good burnout, a dry hop to the line and a great start. The car's rear tires hooked up to The Rock's concrete launching pad and Little made three excellent gear changes. The scoreboard lit up with an 11.60 ET at only 109.68 mph. Returning to the lanes, he said the car had too much rear gear; it flattened out about 1,100 feet.

We couldn't do much about the rear axle ratio, but we could make another run to establish a baseline performance. Talk about consistency--Chad's last pass was a nearly identical 11.63 at 109.61 mph.

We did the math to compare this performance to that of a similarly equipped drag car (725 hp and 3,400 pounds) and came up with an optimum quarter-mile run of 9.53 seconds at 140 mph. Given this information, Little wondered what the No. 97 car might do with different gear ratios in the transmission and reared.

What did he think about running his stock car down the drag?

"It was a lot of fun. The Winston Cup cars have good acceleration, but I know it's nothing like a drag car. You've got to remember that our cars are built to go left, except for two road courses, and the setup is completely different to that of a drag car. I have to think with the right gear, some drag slicks, and the right setup under the car to go straight--in other words, changing the caster--these cars could run in the mid-10s."

Now that we've answered the question of how fast a Winston Cup stock car might run in the quarter-mile, do you think we could convince Warren Johnson to make a few laps around the Rockingham oval in his Grand Am?

[Editor's Note: This experiment took place in 1998, but we wanted to share the results with our readers.]

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