(Photos by Mike Brooks) – Here’s some inside baseball for you. On the night before the last day of Drag Week 2005 I sat at a table with Freiburger, Wes Allison, Rob Kinnan, and maybe someone else that eludes my memory and we chatted about what Drag Week could become. How many cars could show up? Would it get any bigger? How fast would people go? Like all conversations based around rampant speculation, it was fun as hell but completely wrong. None of us has the Nostradamus gene and it showed.
We figured the event would handle about 250 cars tops. We figured that the quickest cars would ever run 7s and probably blow up on day one. We figured that the thing had a shelf life of 5-10 years before people got tired of it. We were happily wrong on every account there. At Norwalk there were nearly 400 cars racing. There were multiple guys running in the 6-second zone, there were guys from countries all over the world who had shipped their cars to the event. This was far more than the humble beginnings of the event would have ever eluded this thing becoming.
Thanks to Mike Brooks for sharing these photos. He had a blast that day and so didn’t we!
Click the images below to expand them and then scroll on to see ’em all –
I said it when I was there and I will say it now- Norwalk is the nicest place I have ever raced. And I was told that the spectator side is even nicer. The facilities and the people that work there are first class!
I agree 100% that place is incredible. So clean, so nice, well laid out, big clean pits, nice track but so many hornets. So many people got stung, myself, co-driver, fellow driver got stung twice. Otherwise it was great.