Ultimately Chad will tell the whole tale of his 2014 Drag Week with Larry Larson. He’ll give you the details on how they got about an hour’s sleep total in three days, how they nearly gave up in Topeka, how encouragement, fans, and sheer force of will kept them going, and how they actually made it to Friday on Drag Week, which no one can really fathom considering how their week was going. People have had an easier time of sneaking out of North Korea than these guys had on Drag Week.
Chad will tell you about all of that because he lived it first hand from the passenger seat, the starting line, and the garages where they slept. I wanted to share this video today because we’re at the last day of the actual event (Shootout tomorrow) and it is a really compelling piece of video that shows how close Larry, Chad, and an army of old school drag week racers pulled together and helped their friend in his time of need.
The blow by blow will be incredible but allow me to set the scene. Larry and Chad were stuck in Topeka overnight on Tuesday. They left in the middle of the night for Noble, Oklahoma where we were racing on Wednesday. The men had until 2:15 to get to Thunder Valley and be sitting in their staging lanes. The truck rolled in to an uproarious bout of applause from the crowd and an army of impromptu helpers descended on the thing like locusts. The transition from street trim to race trim was hastily completed in minites and the truck rolled into the lanes with ONE MINUTE before we would have shut them out.
The two sleep deprived men went through their final checks, Larry strapped in, and fired the truck. He’s the last car in the place. We’re all losing our minds. Was he really going to just roll in and uncork a run to save his week? Would the Babe Ruth of this event call his shot again and plug one into the stands? We were talking about the sheer triumph of making it into the lanes on this day when Larry burned out and came back. As he began to stage the truck the place was about to explode. Then….nothing. The truck suffered a driveline failure and rolled slowly down the track. Silence. Confusion.
Chad will fill us in on the gory details but this video shot by the guys at Hot Rod spells out the scene amazingly well. Larry is still in, racing Drag Week until the end but he is not in contention for the Unlimited title. He is, however chasing Andy Frosts record. Stay tuned, this could be awesome.
PRESS PLAY BELOW TO SEE A MOMENT OF BOTH INCREDIBLE TRIUMPH AND STUNNING DISAPPOINTMENT FOR LARRY LARSON AND HIS SUPPORTERS –
Poor Larry, he worked so hard on this rig!
The burnout looked and sounded STELLAR!!!! What a kick in the pants to not have it make a decent pass….. Its been said a million times already…but hats off to those guys for even getting there! If I thought they were tired BEFORE from the build, they HAVE to be asleep on their feet by now!
Dont want to be a party pooper but tiredness and Drag Racing are not good partners.Theres a time to admit defeat and its not in your hospital bed or worse.That said i love drag week and i know why they keep going.
What’s the latest skinny on the S-10?
Were the guys able to drive it to Tulsa to avoid a DQ?
What did his 4-day average end up being?
Larson has a snowball’s chance in hell of winning, unless the quicker guys break and can’t break the beams or receive a best time slip of 20 seconds, or are DQ-ed.
Is there even a jacket for the quickest e.t. of the meet?
Com,on boys make your minds up is Andy Frost driving the worlds fastest machine or not ? We”ll never know until they meet up doing the same challenges . They’er both great !
where were the wheelie bars ?
I take back everything I originally said about that truck not being extreme enough to make the point that drag week unlimited class has gone too far when the truck was first unveiled.
I took the truck at face value, and thought it was no wilder than anything else running unlimited. In some areas, not near as wild(still being steel and having a VIN). I said if they really wanted to make a statement, they needed a street legal flopper or something along those lines.
Now I see what point they were trying to make. They swap out the nearly half the truck to take it from street trim to race trim, but it is still within the rules and still a ‘street car’ after it has been swapped over to race trim. LOL. Not quite, as it is no longer the same truck. Well played, guys.
There does need to be some rules set to make the cars have to race with the same parts(or same replacement parts if something breaks) that the cars made the drive with. Only exceptions should be for the tune up and tires. Everything thing else needs to remain the same on the car for the racing and the driving. No cutting off supercharger belts for the drive and replacing them to race, swapping to lighter weight parts for the race, etc. Go as wild as you want, but you have to make that drive in the same configuration. That should also put an end to the street car/race car debate.
There will never be an end to that debate.
Well, if the car can make the drive, it is legally registered, and makes a pass in the exact same configuration it made the drive in, what could you argue with that? Even a street legal flopper funny car(if one existed) couldn’t be contested if there were no mechanical changes made from street to strip.
Most of the debates I have seen are of the people who change out so many parts from street trim to race trim. Once you change all those parts, it is no longer the same streetable car. That shouldn’t be allowed, something that Larson’s truck pushed to the nth degree.
Yeah, it may not end the debate, but 75% of people who find one thing or another to complain about should be shutted up by forcing cars to run in the same config they showed up to the track in. There should be a no parts swap rule. You can make adjustments to parts that can be adjusted, and change tires, but other than that, all mechanical parts have to remain the same. All exhausts and other required street legal equipment, whatever it took to get a plate for it, has to be still on the car when it makes a pass. Replacement parts would have to be the same as what broke. Who could debate street car/race car with that in effect?
I forgot to add, and vice versa. Whatever you race with, has to be still on the car when you make the drive.
Really need an edit feature on these comments!
This moment, as dramatic as it was, was quickly eclipsed IMO at Great Bend by Doug Cline’s quick-turnaround hot lap at the end of the program . . . which was necessary to answer Lutz and also to become the first steel all-six-second car in DW history.