Brian Lohnes: The Numbers That Mattered And Why They May Not Anymore
It is only natural to gauge any form of competition, no matter what, on its records. How many home runs has a guy hit in a season, or how many touchdown passes have been thrown? In drag racing, it usually reverts back to the absolute quickest elapsed times for a particular class or category.
For the first decade plus of drag-and-drive it was about those absolute records. How hard could the Unlimited cars go day after day? The quickest averages, the quickest singular elapsed times, those were the numbers that hung over the whole genre like an umbrella. And then, something changed.
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The rise of small tire drag racing shifted a lot of attention in the sport to the performances that could be generated by powerful cars on 275s and 315s and less about those on large slicks. Lo and behold the same thing happened in drag-and-drive. This is not a shot at Unlimited competitors, but what was once the question of every event, “How quick will Unlimited go?” was replaced by chatter about guys running sevens on little tires, creating packages and tune ups to alter the approach to open performance classes into index-style racing, and even more attention onto diversified platforms being used to achieve these goals. People still ask, people still wonder, and people still revel at the raw audacity of the Unlimited cars, but it seems just as many or more are glued to the other stuff.
In a statement I didn’t think I’d ever make in my life, Jeff Lutz’s record of 6.19 from Drag Week almost a decade ago will not be broken by an Unlimited class car. It will be broken by a small tire style car using a factory style engine combination. Maybe one we know, maybe one that is being built now, but not by one of the beastial cars occupying the unchained end of drag-and-drive. Those cars, in my opinion WILL now and forever hold the single pass outright records. At least into the deeply foreseeable future.
Why? Well as much as factory architecture style engines can be an Achilles heel, they hold a massive advantage in the trying circumstances of drag-and-drive over stuff that was built for all-out drag racing and modified to work on the street. Their performance is engineered in the other direction. A Coyote, LS, or Gen III Hemi will be inherently better at the ‘little’ things that kill the backward engineered race engines. Why? Because of hundreds of millions in R&D development. It is one thing to take a factory design and brace it up to work in extreme conditions. It is wholly another to try and reverse engineer something that was never intended to work but a handful of seconds at a time to survive the rigors of street driving and on-track stresses. Sounds insane? Tell me why.
Lastly, drag racing will always be a numbers game. It keeps us engaged as dorks and enthusiasts so don’t get what I am saying twisted. People will ALWAYS care about the numbers. It’s the ones they care about that evolve and change over time. As the 2024 season continues, I’m interested to know the numbers YOU care about and why. Let the answers rip.
Written by Brian Lohnes.
