Dorey Stories: Making The Case for Bracket Racing
Written by Adam Dorey.
I know, I know. Most of the people in drag-and-drive are excited by heads-up racing.
Both racing and watching heads-up is a day full of edge-of-your-seat fun. But there’s also many of us that don’t have the cubic dollars to compete in races like these, where the old saying comes into play: “Speed costs money, how fast do you want to go?”
For a person without deep pockets, and someone that’s had to scrape and save for an entry fee to even get into the race, I found a home in bracket racing. It has a special piece of my heart and it’s a fun way for you to get onto a race track near you!
Bracket racing gives you a place to race anywhere in the country, nay world! Find yourself in Maui with a rental car and a race night? Get some shoe polish on the window and go have fun with people you’ve never met before. Bonus points if you end up doing well and going a few rounds and you might have some brand-new friends.
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Bracket racing is handicapped racing, where after a time trial or three, each racer gets to choose the time they think their car will travel the 660’ or 1320’ in. The slower car gets a head start and if both drivers have perfect reaction times, and run exactly their estimated time, theoretically there would be a tie. However, like The Price is Right, if you predict too slow and you go quicker than your chosen time, you break out and lose as well, so it’s a balancing act of guessing a time, but not guessing it too far off of what the car will run. It’s a game where thousandths of seconds matter and driving on both ends of the track will determine a winner and a loser.
What’s exciting to me about bracket racing is the utter lack of specific rules for cars, motorcycles and dragsters in each class. One round you may line up with a big tire car, and the next round a two-wheeler, and the last round a rail! Classes are typically split up by the use of electronics. In this case, electronics refer to a device such as a delay box, which allows the driver to react to the first yellow light they see. The box delays the launch electronically. While reaction times just as good are possible without a delay box, a delay box produces them with greater consistency.
If you’ve been to a national event and you wonder why the cars launch, then go to idle, then launch again a short time later, this is a throttle stop — another electronic advantage. Typically used in index classes, the advantage here is big top end speed so you can ‘chase’ an opponent, allowing the driver to better judge the stripe.
No electronics or ‘no box’ classes use none of the above, and typically racers will use the third yellow as their signal to leave off a transbrake, clutch pedal or foot-brake.
This is where you’ll start, and your local track may call these classes something different, but typically an entry level class will be called the “Sportsman” class, or some variant. Pro class is typically also non-electronics but for more seasoned racers with quicker cars, and Super Pro will typically have electronics in it, and are typically for the more experienced racers with those specialty devices in their cars.
The appeal of bracket racing, in my eye, is that any competitor in any car is a contender in any given round of racing. Seven-second or 20-second cars have the same possibility of turning on a win light, and it all comes down to the consistency of the car, and the reaction of the driver as well as the ability to “drive the stripe” on the top end.
There will be a place for heads up racing, and it’ll always be super fun to watch a couple of rides burning down the quarter mile with reckless abandon, looking to better their opponent with brute force, huge horsepower, scramble buttons and third kits. But for the average joe, getting behind the wheel of anything with tires and an engine and cutting a 0.000 light will equal that adrenaline rush at that moment, and you can do it with whatever you have in the driveway right now.
Give it a go. You just might like it! Especially the first time you turn on a win light against a car with lexan windows, big tires, and open headers in your daily driver.
