The Weekly Reekie: Making The Case For Short Drag-and-Drives
A couple of months ago I tagged along with Tom and Aydan Bailey as they raced at the first-ever Drop The Hammer event in Michigan. It was an 1/8th-mile, three-day drag-and-drive deal. It started at US 131 Motorsports Park on Friday, moved to Mid Michigan Motorplex on Saturday, and returned to US 131 on Sunday.
My only previous experience of this shortened “weekender” format was in Australia at Street Machine Drag Challenge Weekend in 2018 and 2019. Even back then I was in two minds about it. On the one hand, it takes less commitment than a five-dayer, which makes it more doable for a lot of people. On the other hand, it takes less commitment than a five-dayer, which makes finishing it feel like less of a feat.
For less than a dollar a day, you can feed starving freelancers like Matt Reekie. Subscribe to Sick The Magazine!
Not that Steve Morris was feeling like any less of a winner at Drop The Hammer. He worked hard for his overall victory, chasing electrical gremlins all around his ‘Boostmaster’ wagon for three days, posting times of 4.77/175mph, 4.98/164mph and 4.61/167mph, respectively. Unsurprisingly, Steve instantly became an advocate for the three-day drag-and-drive.
“I think three-day events are kinda cool,” he said. “It just makes it a little more practical for everybody.”
Yes, it is more practical. And yes, it’s still good fun and you can make great memories over a long weekend, but I don’t get anywhere near the same sense of satisfaction afterwards as I do from completing a traditional week-long deal. Drag Week has always been Drag Week and will always be Drag Week. After 20 years, nobody has felt the need to tinker with the length of it. And for good reason.
We hear it stated all the time, but I don’t think you can truly get it across to somebody who has never done it – drag-and-drive is tough. It’s tough on vehicles, tough on racers, and yes, it’s even tough on us media goons. I personally never felt as though three days was tough enough. It’s just not enough time for things to go really pear-shaped. And where’s the fun in that, I ask you?
Five days is just the right amount of time to be broken and rebuilt. So often it happens that things begin to unravel usually around day three, although sometimes earlier. Small problems snowball into bigger problems. Before you know it, you’re run ragged and you’re at your wits’ end. You’re on the verge of packing it in, but you don’t pack it in. Instead, you stay and fight through the fatigue and work to overcome your problems. You make it to day four and you can see light at the end of the tunnel. Adrenaline kicks in to help carry you through. By the final day, you’re walking on air, feeling no pain, deliriously happy to have made it back. I gotta tell ya, kids, you can only get this kind of redemption on a five-day drag-and-drive.
And yet, as I came to learn at Drop The Hammer, there are some folks for whom five days is just not feasible. Folks like multi-time Roadkill Nights winner Jimmer Kline. Jimmer and his nitrous-fed 1966 GTO are well-known for their exploits on Woodward Avenue, but Drop The Hammer was their first actual drag-and-drive outing.
“We’ve done a lot of street driving and races where we had to drive 30 miles and then race, but we’ve never done anything really far,” Jimmer said. “So we wanted to see if we could actually make one of these drag-and-drives. We decided to pick this one because it was local and it was a little bit shorter distances, to get our feet wet and learn how to do it.”
The shortened format suited Jimmer because he runs a busy shop, Go Fast Productions, in Wyoming, MI, so it’s hard to justify a whole week away. Drop The Hammer worked well because he only needed to take the Friday off and give up a weekend. Also, Jimmer’s wife has been battling illness for the past few years, so he doesn’t want to be away from home for any length of time. Again, Drop The Hammer worked well because the Mid Michigan track is right near his house. On day two he was able to go home, see the wife and sleep in his own bed.
Looking at it from that perspective, I have to concede that any event that gets a car like Jimmer’s GTO on the streets and strips is a good one. I suspect we’ll see even more of these three-day ‘cakewalks’ popping up on the racing calendar in the future.
— Matt Reekie
More from Matt Reekie
