After three tough days of racing at the Nitto NMRA/NMCA Super Bowl of Street Legal Drag Racing, the real fun begins. Class champions from the NMRA and the NMCA clash in one of drag racing’s most unique exhibitions known as the Super Bowl Shootout. Some classes run heads up and some run with a handicapped, no breakout format. While the majority of the classes are fairly close in elapsed time, there was one really glaring exception and it was when the winner of the NMRA’s Detroit Locker Truck and Lightning Class Jim Roberts squared off against the winner of the NMCA Top Sportsman class Eddie Banderowicz. We’re talking about a 12-second truck taking on a middle 7-second Camaro with a monster Rehr and Morrison engine in it.
The beauty of this situation is that both guys were running flat-out. The only object was to get to the end of the race track first. There’s no such thing as a breakout in this scenario so it was simply about getting to the stripe first. In a stroke of genius, the guys at Promedia strapped some cameras to the truck and got great video. They posted the rearward facing video because it is the most dramatic look at the run.
You will see Roberts’ truck launch and start to make some pretty good steam down track and just about the time that Eddie’s Camaro is out of sight you can hear the huge motor roar to life and the distance between the two cars begins to shrink and shrink rapidly. How close was it at the stripe? How about .0064 favoring…..the Camaro.
Watch one of the wildest drag racing videos you will see all day right here!
You may think this looks cool but it is the dumbest thing ever. Would you like to be the Top Sportsman guy making a pass when something goes wrong in a street car in front of you? Or the truck guy getting drilled from behind out of nowhere by the TS car when something goes wrong with it? I get that things will go wrong at any time when evenly matched cars run but with these two vehicles it would be nearly instantly tragic. The lack of safety gear in the truck vs the full chassis in the car would be no contest especially at the speeds that Camaro is running.
Agreed, I always said handicapped races should be limited to 2.5 seconds difference max.
Yep pretty scary stuff. When I went to Atco for Mopar day back in 1987 the only two completely stock cars that were running that day were some guy in a 72 Dart with a 318 running high 17’s and me in my dad’s 71 340 Duster that ran 14.80’s like a Xerox machine back then before it was restored.
I think the 3rd slowest car on track that day was running mid-10’s so EVERY pass would be the same. Me almost at the finish line and then here comes the noise! One car after another would go hammering by me at at least 30-100 MPH faster than I was going!!
Between the noise and the wind pressure pushing my car around as they went by and just plain worrying about somebody losing it and ramming me from behind it was probably the scariest day I ever spent on a track. Really NOT a good idea!!
Jesus. The safety terrorists are out in force today.
I was at Atco for the Pan-Am Nationals import race one year. I brought a 20-second Datsun 200SX, and won my class against cars running 13’s & quicker.
At a Gamblers race at Englishtown, I witnessed a Super Gas roadster face off against a diesel tractor. (9 sec.dial vs. 25 sec. dial) The roadster crashed on the top end.