While at the various races I have worked over the last few weeks, I have been thinking a lot about how people relate to performance barriers. Of course last weekend in Gainesville was the 25th anniversary of Kenny Bernstein running 301.70 and that brought up a lot of discussion. There’s the long anticipated 200mph barrier breaking run that’s yet to come from a Pro Stock Motorcycle that everyone’s waiting on. In the small tire world there’s the all-out radial record that got smashed at Lights Out 8. The round number barriers, the 4-second stuff, the 200, 300, and 3.70 stuff really gets people charged up. The ramifications of the accomplishment are interesting, though. The methods to achieve the objective are also interesting and vary wildly depending on what part of the sport you spend most of your time in. These barriers and performance progress in general are approached by different people in different ways. It is fascinating really.

Let’s look at the world of all-out radial racing right now. Radial vs the World, Radial Wars, whatever you want to call it. Basically the electrifying class that has few rules outside of the need to run a small(ish) radial tire on the back of your car. The performance marks in the category have fallen like dominoes as of late. The record has dropped more than a tenth in the course if a year with Stevie Fast now holding it at 3.73. This has been a performance and engineering explosion the likes of which drag racing probably last saw in the formative years of the funny cars in the middle/late 1960s. The end result is that there are a handful of elite players who can actually run the record numbers and a plethora of people who are doing their best not to be cannon fodder. A perfect example of what I mean came to light at the NMCA race in Bradenton just a couple of weekends ago. Attendance was sparse in their Radial Wars class. Yes, it is an early season race but there’s some complaints about the rules (from drag racers?! Noooooo) and perhaps the larger issue is that Barry Mitchell initially stated his intention to be there. While Mitchell did not come to the event for his own reasons (I’m not making an issue of that) the fact that many competitors THOUGHT he was coming was enough to keep them at home.

So what was the result? Some of the best radial tire competition I have ever personally witnessed and some of the most exciting. We had an interesting group of cars with guys like David Adkins in his Impala with its 400ci LSx combo, Marty Stinnett in his Fox-body, Chad Opaleski with his ProCharger equipped Chevelle and a bunch of others. What made the race so fun was not the fact that we were going to see a record but the fact that these guys were all racing the wheels off of their cars and hovering around the 3-second mark with a few guys peeking into it. As an announcer, setting a scene of, “will we see a 3?” is way more fun than setting a crowd expectation that the car they are looking at is letting them down unless it runs a 3.70. It was a hell of a lot of fun to watch these cars pound on each other and dance around that three second barrier. Often times it seems that the highest levels of radial racing turn into a home run derby contest in the midst of a race. This was a race where the numbers made it pretty fun.

The rapid and insane escalation of the radial record is a marked difference from the way that these performance barriers and other marks have been achieved on the more traditional side of the sport. Take the 200mph Pro Stock Bike run. Like the 300mph top fuel run that happened in 1992, this has been a slow, plodding march to the goal. An incrementally advancing crawl to breaking what some people say will be the last great performance barrier in NHRA drag racing (they are wrong like everyone who has said that in the past). It has not been about a handful of motorcycles running 5-mph faster than the rest, it has been about someone going 199.2 then someone going 199.5 and now two guys having gone 199.8 mph. A cool qualifying or eliminations round with a tail wind is all it is going to take at this point. When that magical number rolls up on the board, people are going to go crazy and it will be a boon for the class. Being able to advertise “200MPH PRO STOCK BIKES!” is cool and as is usually the case, the dam break of 200mph runs will be soon to follow. No one is going to quit running pro stock bike because someone goes 200. No one is going to not come to a race because Andrew Hines is there or Hector Arana Jr. is there, right? The reason? The other teams feel like they have a shot to do it as well. It is an “upper” for the class. Not a “downer” as these things are sometimes viewed in other realms of the sport.

Recently you probably heard about the incredible back and forth trading of the door slammer record on an international level. The EKanoo team in the Middle East ran a 5.44 to snag the record and a scant few weeks later Jose Gonzales in his El General monster took it back with a 5.409 mark at the PDRA race at SGMP. This is a drag racing nuclear arms race being fought by guys with endless pockets and a thirst to win. It is kind of a circus show but a circus show in the best sense. Why? We get to watch it! It also points to the ever evolving international specter of drag racing. The fun part about this is that the number probably won’t last a season and there are a few teams gearing up for a charge into the 5.30s. Remember, 5.361 is the all time alcohol funny car record. They are shooting for it.

As drag racing evolves (which it is has done every minute of its life and will continue to do until long after they put me in the ground) the performance marks of today will be supplanted by those that are made tomorrow. As a fan of the sport, it is stupid fun to watch no matter the class or category. Why? We get see history. We get to see measured human accomplishment, stuff that no one else has ever seen before.

The funny part of the whole thing is that history seems to show classes which succeed “together” tend to stand the test of time and those that highlight singular performances above the rest don’t. What will we look back on this era 20 years from now and think? Will we remember the microphone dropping massive runs or the fact that those runs served to pull some aspects of the sport apart as opposed to cementing them together? I don’t have the answer to that question but I do know that it sure is fun to watch.