This Wednesday at high noon, the NHRA will host a press conference in Boston. While there has been no official word from either the NHRA or the only sanctioned NHRA track within two hours of the city, New England Dragway, we’re doing a little reporter math here and continually coming up with the same result. We believe with a high level of certainty that this press conference (and an additional presser in Concord, NH) will be the announcement that the NHRA will be having a national event at New England Dragway in 2013. When the track swapped sanctions starting with the 2011 season, both the NHRA brass and New England Dragway officials were quoted in the press as stating the desire to have an event at the facility, after infrastructure upgrades and changes were made.
Since then, the track has been working on improvements along with securing financing to fun the rest of the multi-million dollar upgrade package. Again, we have received no official word from the NHRA or New England Dragway track officials. We have reached out to track leadership at this writing and are awaiting a response. We suspect that we’ll be told that the answer is coming Wednesday, but it cannot hurt to ask!
The NHRA has never had a national event in New England proper. Maple Grove Raceway and Englishtown in Pennsylvania and New Jersey are the closest, but if this presser goes the way we think it will, the countdown clock for New England Dragway’s first NHRA national event will be started and the pressure will be on to get the track upgraded and updated in time. It will be a massive turnout for year one as this area has been absolutely starving for an event for decades.
Stay tuned to BangShift for more news on this subject when it breaks!
