JANUARY, 2005

DRAG RACE
Kentucky, New Jersey, Ford Mustangs, Burning rubber,
Coor's Light, Testosterone, etc.

By Will von Ratblood

PAGE TWO

SUNDAY, AUGUST 8th

Even in the morning Sunday is oppressively hot, but at least there is no rain aside from a brief shower that comes in the afternoon. Again crowds stream into the stands, wander the midway and pit areas, gaze at cars, take pictures of them. Some remaining qualifying runs are finished, and once these are out of the way, cars begin to line up in the staging lanes, are paired off with opponents in their class, and elimination rounds begin.

The first to go on are Bracket cars. Though all Fords, anything goes in this class made up of mostly street legal cars. You could, if you wanted, go rent a Ford sedan - keeping your intentions to yourself, most likely - and bring it to the track to race it in this way. This is part of drag racing’s appeal, that anyone can participate at this level regardless of experience; zooming (though much slower) down the same lanes sanctified by the pros. In Bracket, a driver predicts what his time will be, paints it on the window, and tries to get as close to that as possible. The driver coming in closest to his prediction wins. From the distance of the stands it looks as if these cars are barely moving when they begin. With this effect in mind, it's easy to judge that some cars are accelerating very quickly by comparison as the day proceeds and progressively faster, more powerful cars approach the starting line, each being visibly more rapid. A vantage point close to the car -- down by the starting line, or at a point directly behind the car -- is best for seeing the speed as it is. Viewed from behind, any sideways motion of a car appears as a very rapid jerk as a driver corrects it, and from this view a car shrinks smaller and smaller at an increasing rate.

Understandably, the power of these cars is way above anything the average person will ever experience controlling. Chris and Billy's car has a 400 cubic inch engine creating up to 1500 horsepower, and can get to the finish line in under eight seconds. The even more powerful cars in the top class, Pro 5.0, can do times of just under seven seconds, and can reach 200 miles per hour. By way of comparison, if you own a six- cylinder Saturn L300 sedan, this will put out at most 182 hp and will likely take more than twenty seconds to finish the quarter mile should you take it out on the track. To boost a motor’s basic power, drag cars make use of devices called “power adders” - nitrous oxide, superchargers (blowers), or turbochargers depending on the class - devices attached to various points on the engine in order to raise horsepower. Though illegal for use on the street, if you felt the need, you could add a nitrous oxide system to your Saturn to get to the grocery store faster. And while you’re pursuing that route you might want to add a roll cage to the driver compartment and buy a flame retardant suit and a helmet, safety equipment that becomes required at the track as you race in more powerful classes.

As you proceed up the class ladder cars look not only less and less like their particular make and model, but less and less like anything you’d see on the street at all. The fastest drag cars, Top Fuel - these aren’t run in the NMRA - are those long, pointy cars that appear to be all wheels and engine with a driver, the engine behind him, tucked in the narrow tube of a body like he’s in some kind of suicide-wish, dry land kayak. Even here, however, the vehicles in the top class, Pro 5.0, raise the question of what is left at that level to identify a car as a Ford at all. Going up in class, cars begin to shed their standard mechanical pieces, parts from radiators to steering wheels become aftermarket and exotic custom built things, until you reach the top class in which the car’s frame is a sparse tubular configuration and the body a single piece of fiberglass just fulfilling the minimum required to take the form of a particular model. At this point, aside from the body, more or less, it is required only that the engine be Ford, and in that really just the power plant or block. And, while the block itself has to be of Ford design this doesn’t preclude having it made somewhere aside from the Ford factory; the holy grail of a Ford block can actually be made by another company.

This near-blasphemy, this arguing over holy origins, challenges our conception of the beloved car as divine owing to its make. As we ascend higher levels of enlightenment, the outer parts of the car become less important, familiar and recognizable and the engine becomes all-important, suggesting that at the spiritual summit there exists only one engine/god, not of Ford, Chevy or Toyota make, but of purely unique parts, of aluminum, iron and steel forged in the name of one of whom we cannot speak. It may be that the truth is an amorphous engine figure, and we are mistaken in imposing automobile-like forms on it. But, autopomorphizing aside, these things are attractive. Many find themselves caught up in car worship and addiction.

Racing is an all-consuming life, hobby, or labor of love or whatever else you might choose to call it. When asked on an online drag racing forum, the words obsession and passion came up in answer to what racing and cars meant to participants. Most involved describe a defining moment - typically getting to drive a Mustang or other powerful car in one situation or other -- when they simply fell in love with cars, Fords and racing, pursuing them from then on with every moment of their spare time.[1]

“A lot of guys had hot muscle cars of the sixties and seventies eras where I grew up,” said K.J. Jones, a Mustang enthusiast and racer from Reseda, California, in a mixture of telephone and email conversation. “They lined them up and raced them; Friday nights, light-to-light. When I got into high school and started driving myself, it just was the natural thing for me to do - be part of the ‘car’ and ‘racing’ crowd.” Englishtown, New Jersey, where a serious drag racing scene was fostered in the seventies, was also important to a lot of fans. “I got my first taste of the track when I went to Raceway Park in Englishtown for the first time, at age seventeen,” K.J. said. “When I saw that facility and heard that action I was completely hooked! They gave away a little pamphlet…I remember it said ‘You Can Be A Drag Racer.’ It gave an explanation of bracket racing and handicaps, etc. It said, ‘these are the basics,’ ‘this is what you need,’ and yeah, you could go out on the track and run. That was my eye-opener; I had been to the track before, but I had no idea before that I could even get into it.”

Though New Jersey has always been very important to drag racing in general, and particularly as the main area for the growing interest in Ford racing and the creation of the NMRA in the late nineties, the opposite has been true for Jersey’s auto making industries. After 55 years in existence the Ford assembly plant in Edison closed in February of 2004. The state’s only remaining auto plant, in Linden, is operated by General Motors.

“I think mine [defining moment] was back in the sixties when Englishtown had first opened,” said John Samanick of Neptune, New Jersey over email. He owns an '85 Mustang GT that his daughter Angela races. “They had a few of the first generation funny cars one night when I first attended. Out came the ‘Color Me Gone’ funny from the pits and made a pass. Damn, I said, that’s what I want to do. Well, almost forty years later I still can’t shake the addiction, but never did get to drive a funny car.”

Even if you’re not driving a funny car - an NHRA class car with a front-mounted engine, huge rear wheels, and a fiberglass body shell resembling a street car but that flips up as one piece when the engine needs to be reached - the investment in time and money is large, and the monetary returns are nowhere near enough to allow one quitting a day job. In Super Street Outlaw, for example, a car can cost $100,000 and requires a trailer in which to tow it and tools and equipment. There is an ongoing process of refining a car with upgrades as equipment quickly becomes outdated, worn out or broken. Unless, maybe, you won every single race you entered, there’s no money in it.

Some people will spend nearly every night year round working on a car or racing- related matters. In the weeks before a race, work on the PBM team car usually means about four people working up to five hours a night every night and more on weekends. Of his own car, John says, “I log about 20-40 hours per week on the project, depending on what the agenda might be.” And K.J., who sounds like he does little that isn’t in some way racing-related, is not shy about his commitment. “Well, if having the image of your first (real) race car tattooed on your left arm isn’t ‘devoted,’ I have no clue what is,” he laughed.

•

In the middle of the day there is an intermission and again the motocross stunt riders come out to do their thing. After that the jet car makes a run. The jet car doesn't look so much like a car as it does maybe a wingless experimental plane, a jet engine with a seat and wheels attached. It looks frightening just sitting there: an engine - a 6000 hp Pratt Whitney J-60 - that probably belongs on a vehicle with wings, mounted on a steel frame just inches off the ground, a little steering wheel and a parachute. Jet cars like this one can reach 300 mph in that quarter mile. Do you have to be insane to drive this? My feelings about its danger are confirmed when I find out the previous summer a jet car driver in Atlanta was killed when his car veered into a retaining wall, crashed and caught fire.

Today's jet car is not running well for some reason. The car lets out a few explosive bursts of flame as it sits near the line, psyching up the crowd as it inches toward its starting position, but then as it takes off moves at nowhere near the speed of which it is capable, and the crowd is unimpressed. A teenage boy turns to me and says, "I love that smell," as the odor of burning kerosene drifts over us in the stands.

As the team hasn’t exactly been doing any winning this season, and only one more event remains after this one, the best they can hope for is to end up with a half decent standing at year’s end. I watch as the racing proceeds through the classes. The Super Street Outlaw cars are announced and a pair or two line up and roar down the track before the yellow Cobra I'm waiting for gets its turn. Billy wins the first race, but is later knocked out of the competition after losing the second; had he not been it would have been necessary to win two more after that to take the day in his class. The previous day the car had been pulling to the left as it went down the track. Things had been tweaked but in the trial and error of adjustment there was no way to know for sure whether the problem had been solved. Now, running on the opposite side of the track than it did yesterday, the car had pulled to the right making proper acceleration impossible. Dejected, everyone heads back to the pits. It's still pretty early in the afternoon but there's no point in sticking around, and things are packed up in preparation to leave. A teenager wanders into the pit and asks for Billy's autograph on a poster.

 

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