.

the car junkie daily magazine.

.

Barnstormin’: How The Sausage Is Made


Barnstormin’: How The Sausage Is Made

(Photo by Chuck Danbom) – There’s an old saying out there that goes something like, “You never want to see how the sausage is made.” The point being that while you may enjoy eating the sausage, the process of its creation could potentially turn you off to the whole thing. In the world of drag racing, that expression can ring incredibly true or incredibly hollow depending on the weekend, your location, and what the racing environment is like. I just finished up at the 2017 Outlaw Street Car Reunion in Memphis, Tennessee and if there was one weekend I’d recommend a drag racing version of the sausage factory tour, this was it. A team of dedicated and cool people from around the sport were assembled for this race and despite some big haymakers from mother nature we got the program finished on Sunday night at a very reasonable hour. It was a true pleasure being on the inside of this one.

Operating a drag race seems like it would be the easiest thing in the world, right? Line the cars up, send them down the track, half come back, and half don’t. What could possibly be difficult about that? As it turns out, over the years I have been on the inside of this stuff, it is very easy to torpedo a drag race with bad decisions and shoddy management. Sometimes I can see it coming from a mile way and sometimes it just happens and the tailspin begins. OSCR was a study in people who all specialized in their particular roles coming together and kicking some ass at the same time. I’ll get into the details of this event in a minute, but let’s look at the mechanics of a drag race first.

In order for a program to actually work and work smoothly, you need to have the cars (or the vast majority of them) through tech before the event actually starts. You need to have a functional speaker/radio system so competitors can actually hear calls to the lanes. It’s really kick ass if you have someone who can zip around the pits on a scooter and rouse racers who may be neck deep in a thrash or snoozing under an EZ-up tent. Following that the racers need to arrive at the staging lanes, get into the right lanes, and during eliminations get laddered correctly and then sent on their way. Once they get to the end of staging you need someone there to send the pairs ahead, water box people to handle the burnout procedure and keep that area moving and finally a starting line crew to actually get the cars staged and gone as well as to maintain the race track. After that you have safety people, someone in the time slip shack, and if the race requires, tech people at the scales and fuel check area to make sure everyone is on the up and up. Oh yeah, then there are the people you can’t see. The people in timing tower to enter data into the computer and someone who is the point person that actually directs this whole circus to keep it moving.

Clearly you can see that there’s a bunch of links in this human chain and when any one of them starts to break, stuff goes to hell fast. The NHRA gets all kinds of arrows and bullets shot at it on a myriad of subjects but the one thing that even the most staunch haters begrudgingly agree on is that the organization can operate a race. Events with 500-800 cars are run and run efficiently because there are processes that have been developed over the span of 60 years. It is a pretty fascinating thing to watch and learn from actually. This is especially true on the national event level where there are all kinds of additional bells and whistles that are thrown in with activities and television and other stuff. Unless Ma Nature intervenes, things tend to run smoothly and efficiently.

There is nothing worse than an event ending unfinished. It can happen for a bunch of reasons with weather being the most common one. Big national meets will often finish on Monday but the vast majority of races that rain out the last day of eliminations end abruptly and with no real closure for the fans or the competitors. Some problems are self inflicted and I have seen my fair share of events come to a screeching halt because the race itself was mismanaged.

Remember that chain of events I mentioned earlier? Let’s say the speakers are out in the pits, the track radio broadcaster does not work, and there’s no one spreading the world about lane calls. It takes forever to get the cars to the lanes. Let’s say once their get there, the lane people are non-existent or untrained and the cars get all jumbled up and when the top of staging guy gets to pulling them out, he needs to pull the correct cars and get the others out of the way. Let’s say the water box guys are busy on their phones so every pair waits an extra 30 seconds to start their burnouts, let’s say the starting line guys don’t have their equipment working right and every time they need to do something they have to go off and get their sprayer, tractor, scooter, or whatever. See where this is going?

Drag racing events (outside of weather related issues) don’t usually die quickly. No, it is a painful “death by 1,000 cuts” situation. A race that stretches far longer than it should normally does so because of all those incremental time loses adding up and up on each other. When you think of how many pairs get run per day and start adding even 15-second onto them, you get HOURS of time pretty quickly.

So this all brings me back to the recently completed Outlaw Street Car Reunion IV. The crew of people that ran the event were all seasoned veterans in their particular role. From the water box guy to the race director to the tech guys to the staging lanes staff. When rain dashed the event on Saturday and did not allow for a round of eliminations to be run on that day, we all knew it was going to be a long Sunday. The guys concentrating race track prep worked into the wee hours of Sunday morning scraping, drying, and getting the track ready for competition the following day. Heck, some of the dedicated races just showed up with brooms and stuff to help the process. The whole scene elevated the things we all love about the sport.

When Sunday morning dawned I was really interested to see how the whole thing would shake out. While I should not have been surprised, this group of people delivered one of the great single day performances I can remember being a part of in my time inside the sport. It was drama free, when there were issues they were handled quickly and professionally, and we were sending the final pair of cars down the track to close the event at like 8:30pm having started 12 hours before. This is a radial style race so there’s lots of prep time in there as well. It was like a SWAT team with each specialist handling their role and crushing it.

So yes, there are times where you DON’T want to see how the sausage is made. Days when things slowly but surely unravel themselves into a nightmare. They happen to everyone now and again. When they happen with frequency, that’s a whole different kettle of fish. But then there are days like Sunday when you want to grab every racer and fan by the scruff of their neck and show them what the machine looks like. Show them what the inner workings of this thing actually are. Why? Because when it is working right it is a symphony. It is a symphony of noise, funny radio transmissions, the occasional curse word, and it is all backed by the slightly urgent drumbeat of getting the next pair down the track.

I am fortunate to work with lots of good and motivated people in the sport of drag racing but some days are better than others. Sunday was one of them.

To the fans and racers who attended that event, thanks. We all did our best and you sure showed us yours.


  • Share This
  • Pinterest
  • 0

One thought on “Barnstormin’: How The Sausage Is Made

Comments are closed.