DRAG CHALLENGE
100 cars take on 1500km of street driving and race at five tracks over five days
THE much-misquoted line from the 1989 Kevin Costner flick Field Of Dreams – “If you build it, he will come” – pretty much sums up how the Street Machine team approached creating Drag Challenge back in 2014. We called a couple dozen potential racers, hired a few tracks and crossed our fingers.
That first year was a trial run, organised on the down-low in fairly quick fashion. Just 18 racers turned up, but it proved Hot Rod’s Drag Week concept could work on Australian asphalt. We upped the ante for 2015, stepping up to a fiveday, five-track deal, starting and finishing at Calder Park. This time we attracted 50 racers, all of whom had a ball and promptly went out and spread the gospel.
As a result, we had over 100 cars front up for this year’s Drag Challenge. Once again, we started and finished at Calder Park. Why? Because it gave interstate competitors who want to tow their car to the event a secure place to leave their tow rigs while they are out competing. Tow vehicles, of course, are banned during Drag Challenge. Once racing starts on Day One, if your car goes on a trailer for any reason, you’re out of the game.
This year we left the rules largely as they have been, but made a few changes to the way we ran the event to improve things.
For starters, we decided to begin racing on Monday and finish on Friday. While this isn’t great from a spectator’s point of view, it helps the racers in terms of more shops being open during the event so that emergency parts can be located to keep cars on the road.
In addition to that, we added a registration day to the schedule. In previous years, we’ve scrutineered the cars and started racing on the same day, but with over 100 cars to process we decided to take the pressure off, which seemed to work a treat. We had a few stragglers registering on race day, but the vast majority were ready to roll first thing Monday morning. The relaxed pace of the registration day also gave the racers, officials, sponsors and the Street Machine crew a chance to socialise and check out the competition.