You’ll be hearing a lot about Kenny Bernstein’s famed 301 mph shot at the 1992 NHRA Gatornationals this week. Why? The 25th anniversary of the moment will be celebrated at 2017 version of that race about a week from now. Outside of the obvious implications of what they did in front of that packed house in Florida, there are some hidden elements of that story you likely do not know about. One of those is mechanical and you can read Dale Armstrong’s account of that below and the the other is media related.

First the media story –

One of the things you may notice about the video featuring the 301mph run is that you won’t see the typical angles of it that were featured on TNN at the time. Why? The vast majority of the TV crew had left the track already to prepare to cover the half of fame induction at the Don Garlits museum that night. The footage of “the run” is actually a bunch of other runs all clipped together. There’s no shot of the scoreboard and there’s nothing that would lead you believe to think that you were watching some other run, but you are. But the real kicker comes from the top end shot.

The team comes down whooping and hollering, jumping around and celebrating and a jubilant Bernstein talks about the pass, talks about his sponsors and crew, and seems genuinely overwhelmed. Kenny should have been given an Oscar. Why? It was filmed the next morning. There was no one there to film it the moment that it happened! The whole thing is a recreation of the moment they arrived after making the pass. Just pay attention to the light in the shot. The run itself happened in the afternoon, the sun is clearly in a morning position at the top end!

We tell this story because it is fun and hilarious, not because we’re trying to throw anyone under the bus. It is a pretty neat hunk of quietly forgotten history by many

Now the mechanical end of things –

We’ll leave you on an electrifying note. The first 300mph run in nitro drag racing was the result of some hot rodded magnetos. Not surprisingly, that hot rodding was done by Dale Armstrong himself after a lot of trying and vexing experiments. Rightfully, Armstrong is most proud of that 300mph run because his name will forever be attached to it. Race wins and championships fade over time, but barrier smashing lives forever. Here’s the quick tale of how condensers turned Kenny Bernstein into a bonafide drag racing immortal and the end of our conversation with Dale Armstrong  in his own words –

“Back in 1992 I was talking with Ron Armstrong (co-founder of Racepak) about magnetos and how we would have to send the magnets back to the manufacturer after each race to get recharged. I was frustrated because I thought the weak magnets were hurting us on the track and that there had to be some way to improve them. Ron told me about rare Earth magnets and how they were a lot stronger than regular magnets. I thought that could be the ticket so we got some of the correct size and installed them into the magnetos. I put the rare Earth equipped magneto on the test stand and it was so powerful it completely fried the points in less than three seconds. I brought an electrical engineer in to work with us for the day and we spent hours trying all different things. I really thought that a condenser would help save the points but even after installing them it didn’t. I asked the engineer if moving the condenser closer to the points (it was on about a one inch wire at the time) would help and he didn’t think so. Later, he left because we were getting nowhere and he thought he was wasting our money by being there. After he left, I soldered the condenser right next to the points and stuck a new magnet in the magneto, it made all the difference in the world. I could simulate a run and the points would live. I was able to run the test stand for 5-6 seconds at 8,000RPM and it worked. I literally put those magnetos into my carry on bag and flew to Gainesville. We made the first run with our regular magnetos and went like 299mph or something and then we installed the ones with the condensers on them and it went 301. The only problem with the whole thing was that there was no way to hide the condensers as they were installed on the outside of the magnetos so it didn’t take long for people to figure out what was going on. On the 301mph run, I had actually turned around to walk away and heard all the screaming. I was scared to look!”