Jake’s Dragstrip is a small, eighth-mile outlaw strip near Moulton, Alabama. It’s one of those places that requires a trip down a dirt road to find, and when you get there you might as well be back in 1970: there’s two bathrooms, one concession stand, enough stands for about the first half of the track, and the place where the Ratty Muscle Cars group could line up and get down to business at. Amazingly enough, this is the first strip I’ve been to where grass areas are bigger than any paved surface, which seemed fitting. As the cars filtered in and parked, I found my way to a concession stand cheeseburger…after running most of the day on Pop-Tarts and a bottle of water, something was needed.

The rules of the No Shine Shit List racing deal is pretty simple: first and foremost, your car better look like a $5,000 Craigslist score. It doesn’t matter if you’re rocking a real-deal Hemi car or a tattered mid-1990s Mustang…so long as it’s not newer than 1999 and looks like it’s actually been used, you’re in. No slicks, nitrous, or aftermarket forced induction systems are allowed. And no trick suspension items are allowed, either. This is truly a low-buck deal…the only class of racing I’ve seen that’s even remotely similar to RMC is a high-school bracket class. But that doesn’t mean that everything here is a pup. One Nova revved to the moon in the blink of an eye. A couple of the “rat rods” had zero trouble lighting their road tires off in second, and were now headed to the line with DOT radials on. And the big-block second-gen Camaro that’s halfway through a restoration had something for anyone who tried. And if you really wanted to be cocky, Austin had his 1969 Super Bee lined up and ready to take on any challengers.

I stayed for two rounds of RMC racing. Considering I had a four-hour drive back to home base to make and that racing didn’t kick off until six-thirty at night, I was playing it safe. But in those two rounds, I was treated to a down-home heads-up drag race framed by the setting sun and the clearing sky. And at round two, the arm-drop part of the show in the form of the lovely lady who stepped in front of the Christmas tree appeared. The tree was used for staging, then it was point to drivers, arms up, arms down, tires up in smoke and RPMs climbing up the tach.

Last time I was out at an RMC event, I had to skip the drive and the dragstrip session. This time, I was there for both, but in a car that, while it meets the spirit of the rules (a daily beater that isn’t treated special), is about three thousand dollars and seven years out of contention. Next time, we’re bringing something within rules. That just leaves the question: which gets finished first, the Mustang or the Imperial?

Big thanks to Jake’s Dragstrip for waiving the entrance fee to let me in to shoot photos! 

Click on a photo below to check out the scene from the starting line at Jake’s Dragstrip!

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