They started their seasons with a bang at Sick Week Presented by Gear Vendors Overdrive, when Graham Hayes and the team of Devin Vanderhoof and Josh Davis not only won their classes, but finished in the top three overall.
Both of these powerful rides now set their sights on Rockingham Dragway, and the Sick At The Rock event Presented by Motion Raceworks.
With all four of our major Sick The Mag events sold out for 2025, next month's Sick At The Rock is one of your last chances to compete in a Sick The Mag drag and drive in 2025.
Despite the popularity of Sick The Magazine’s week-long major drag and drive events, Tom Bailey toyed with the idea of doing a smaller 2-3 day event format, with a shorter drive / cruise for street car-based classes, more categories with good payouts, and some additional classes to round out the event.
That idea, combined with some of the classes from the defunct National Muscle Car Association (NMCA) and National Mustang Racers Association (NMRA) series, has morphed into a pair of 3-day Sick The Mag events. The latest one, Sick On The Green, being held May 29th – 31st, 2025, is now open for registration!
The second Sick The Mag 3-day event of 2025, Sick On The Green, boasting over $60,000 in payouts, lands at the popular Beech Bend Raceway Park in Bowling Green, Kentucky. In addition to the popular Lil Gangsta’s class for a $10K payout, and Sick The Mag’s newest class, the Sick Street Car Challenge with over $30K in payouts, five popular classes will complete the list for Sick On The Green’s racing activities.
The class line-up includes:
- Small Tire Pro Stock: a 7-second naturally aspirated quarter-mile class on a 10.5" width slick.
- Coyote Stock: Ford cars with factory sealed Coyote crate engines and manual transmissions, on a 28 x 10.5" width slick tire, stick shifting to wheelies and 9-second times.
- Street Race 8.60 Index: Street cars and trucks vying in side-by-side competition, on an 8.60-second quarter-mile index, with a mandatory cruise.
- Open Comp: Cars and trucks in the 7-14 second range, quarter-mile competition format, using commonly accepted Open Comp class rules.
- Nostalgia Super Stock / Nostalgia Muscle Car Combo: 1955-1985 period-correct nostalgia cars in the 8-15 second range, on a quarter-mile distance, big and small tire cars (Nostalgia Super Stock), and small tire cars (Nostalgia Muscle Car).
- The Sick Street Car Challenge: a two-day drag and drive format (Friday May 30th and Saturday May 31st), competing on an eighth-mile distance, where street legal machines will battle for $32,000 in prize money across over two-dozen categories, with the ability to stack more than one category for huge payouts!
- Lil Gangsta’s 5.30 No-Time: a class that combines a $10,000 winner-take-all payout with a no time slips / scoreboards off format to keep the competition interesting. The class is based around a 4-tenths pro tree, a 5.30 index on the eighth-mile, and a small tire format.
The popularity of the drag and drive event format has brought thousands of people from the tests and tune side of drag racing to get to experience what many consider the next level of the street and strip combination of fun.
But drag and drive has also caught the interest of many a heads-up racer as well, and this ’67 Pontiac Firebird of Jim Trettel also marked his re-introduction to the sport. After taking a couple decades away from the sport, this first-year Firebird would be his ticket back.
“I had a really pristine ‘68 Firebird that was just too nice to make into a race car,” said Jim. “My brother had this ‘67 in the process of being restored, so we cut a deal to swap them. I then enlisted my brother-in-law Nathan Chesler of Cage Rage Fabrication to build the 25.5 SFI-spec chassis, suspension and turbo kit."
Can this classic Firebird combine its good looks with awesome performance at our Sick At The Rock Presented by Motion Raceworks?
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The announcement of Cleetus McFarland purchasing half ownership in Bradenton Motorsports Park recently didn’t come as a shock to many, as Cleetus currently owns the Freedom Factory circle track right next door in southwest Florida.
Cleetus is known for some radical ideas, but when he got together to discuss ideas with track co-owner and friend Victor Alvarez, they came up with a simple concept involving street cars and a top ten list.
“We’re doing this top ten list because I realized our cars are getting really fast,” said Cleetus. “Although it is fun to make a killer fast pass, it’s one of the most stressful forms of racing you can do. Everything has to go right.”
So, a plan was put together to get back to basics: using a test and tune night at Bradenton Motorsports Park instead of a big race, real street cars that needed to be driven in the gate, and creating a top ten list.
“I wanted to do something to make test and tunes more fun again for myself and my buddies,” Cleetus said. The initial race would be a 16-vehicle roster, and races would be paired by random chip draw each round, and a four-tenths pro tree start would be used, with no transbrakes allowed. A floating break out to keep a reasonable gauge on attainable performance would be used (meaning cars can’t run quicker than the accepted limit).
After four days of cold temperatures, insane racing action and sizable crowds at South Georgia Motorsports Park, some recognizable names and repeats winners led the storylines at one of the biggest drag radial tire themed races, Lights Out 16.
After two days of qualifying, eliminations got underway on Saturday, February 22nd, and were completed on Sunday, February 23rd, 2025, by crowning winners in thirteen different classes.
As we covered on Thursday’s first qualifying session story, the Radial Versus the World class grabbed headlines when Paolo Guist reset the class record with a 3.479 pass. The other half of that pair, Ken Quartuccio, clocked a 3.49 on that run, but would return on Friday, February 21st, to drop the record further with a 3.743 run.
Quartuccio employed that performance through eliminations, using a pair of 3.4-second runs to score his third final round appearance in as many events.
Nearly two decades ago, Donald ‘Duck’ Long noticed that one of the biggest groups of heads-up racing, Outlaw Drag Radial, wasn’t being given the amount of attention he felt they deserved. So, he did something about it, and sixteen years after the ‘Lights Out’ event debuted at South Georgia Motorsports Park, it remains a destination race for racers and fans where the wild and unpredictable happens, as well as many a record are set.
Paolo Guist would be the lone car to dip into the 3.4-second range in the top tier Radial Versus The World (RVW) class during the first session, clocking a 3.498 at 213.60 MPH blast for the top qualifying spot. The impressive run was just twelve thousandths of-a-second off the world record of 3.486 at 213.83 MPH from ‘Stevie Fast’ Jackson, set last March at Alabama International Dragway. But Guist wasn’t done yet.
With the sun all but gone and track temperatures dropping quickly, the entire list of heads-up classes had completed their first session of qualifying. But the decision was made for one more round of RVW qualifying. Guist would be in the first pair of cars out of the staging lanes, lining up alongside a former Lights Out event winner, Ken Quartuccio.
The scoreboards would show history less than three and-a-half seconds later, and for more than one reason!