Let’s Speed Up Drag Racing

8/8/05

e all know drag racing is the most visceral of motorsports, with sight, sound, scent, touch, and even taste often contributing to the overall experience. However, a recurrent knock against the digs is they sometimes drag on (no pun intended); leading to spectator—and even racer—burnout before an event is completed. That point was driven home to me recently when I attended a short-track stock car race.

After covering stock cars for several years before finally seeing the light and dedicating my efforts to the chronicling of straightline competition, I was looking forward to a return to my racing roots, so to speak. I hadn’t seen a live roundy-round event in about four years, so it was a familiar, yet distinct change of pace.

The rigs started rolling in to the speedway about 1 p.m. for its weekly fare of six racing classes. Entries ranged from beat-up four bangers on open trailers pulled by equally beat-up pickups to state-of-the-art Late Models transported in full-blown tractor-trailer units—not unlike the spectrum of haulers you might find at any dragstrip across the country.

The thing is—and it struck me as significant—these guys were all arriving to race that night! Each class went out individually over the next couple of hours for a couple of group practice sessions, the track held a brief drivers’ meeting, each car in each division ran separate qualifying laps to set the fields, and by shortly after 7 p.m. the national anthem was playing and we were ready to go racing—right on time. After a few spirited side-by-side duels punctuated by brief cleanups for the inevitable collisions, I was in my car by 11 that night and on my way knowing who all the winners were.

It was a tight, compact experience that allowed the diehards to arrive early for all the preliminary on-track sessions, while still offering a predictable start time for more casual fans to take in only the actual racing action.

Contrast that with the typical two- or three days that even the simplest drag race involves. Racers arrive Friday or Saturday to race on Sunday and more often than not the schedule is anything but predictable, at least as far as knowing ahead of time when each class will appear. (And I’m not talking national events or bracket races here, but rather the many special events or smaller touring events that most strips periodically host.)

The format is not exactly fan friendly, as it’s an all-day affair just to get qualifying completed, and sometimes even then it’s not over, as was the case at a drag race I attended the day after the stock car event, where a final round of qualifying was held on Sunday before the race. So, even if you were there all day on Saturday, you couldn’t have left the track knowing for certain who the top qualifiers were or how the elimination pairings would shape up.

My question is, why can’t at least some drag racing events adopt the one-day format that works so well for the circle trackers? Granted, there are unique challenges, such as typically four to six times more cars involved at a big drag race, but drag racing allows for qualifying in pairs, so attempts are completed much quicker. In the time it takes for one stock car to find its raceday position, four, six, or even eight drag cars might establish qualifying times. Likewise, raceday at a dragstrip allows for many eliminations over the time it takes to run a 30-, 50- or 100-lap stock car race.

And where is it dictated that each competitor must have multiple time trials followed by at least two, but more typically three qualifying sessions? I’d like to see a track promote a big event where the teams might arrive the night before, but open testing begins bright and early on Saturday—the only day that draws a decent crowd, at least here in the south —offering just one opportunity for each team to get a read on the track. If you arrive late, too bad, give it your best guess in qualifying. If you blow the tires off or break, well, at least you learned something, but that would be your one and only chance before the test session ended at a predetermined time.