It’s starting to feel like a long week for competitors in Hot Rod Magazine’s Drag Week 2010 presented by Gear Vendors. The level of carnage is rising, nerves are frayed, the competition is getting fierce, and tempers are getting short. Oh, and did we mention the water falling from the sky? Yeah it sucks like a 4 year old on a McDonalds milk shake. A bit of water can’t stop Drag Week competitors from racing though, or keep us from changing out the clutch in Dad’s Camaro. I swear there were at least eight BangShifters who pitched in and got the clutch out, back in, and on the road, right before the big boy rain came slamming us again.
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As you saw in an early afternoon update, Lutz outran Larson today in the battle for the Unlimited and Overall titles. Lutz finally got the heavy ’57 Chevy into the 7.0 second range, while Larson was sitting second with a 7.15. Larson still holds the overall average lead, by about .15, but this could get really interesting by weeks end. Both racers want to be the first in the 6’s during Drag Week, but we’ll just have to see how the next two days go.
Today was a really hard day on the participants because of all the rain, which made for some scary back roads driving. A few people were in a tornado (but not hurt or the victims of any damage), Mike from Omaha did a sweet 540 degree tail whip with his Fox Body Mustang, and killed a couple wheels but was able to get spares and continue on with way less damage than we expected. Several cars were out on the road with lifter problems, and we saw plenty of guys running half the speed limit because of the rain. The big tire cars are especially scary in the wet stuff, and it was slow going for them. In fact, it is 3am as we write this and we are still hearing cars roll into the host hotel. We didn’t get here until 2am, and we are dog tired. Running out of gas once again today didn’t help, but was really only a short delay.
Special thanks to the whole BangShift crew that helped slam Dad’s car together today. You guys rule and know who you are. Major kudos to Jeff Lutz for nailing his first 7.0 in the cool ’57 as well. It was such a scary day on the road, that we are kinda scared to hear who is out and what happened tomorrow, but we’ll let you know as soon as possible.
In the meantime, check out the photo gallery we’ve got up today. We’ll try to do more video tomorrow too.
Click here or on the photos below for the gallery from Thursday at Hot Rod Drag Week 2010.
Click here to see all of our coverage from Hot Rod Drag Week.
