The Drag-and-Drive Hangover – That Feeling You Get When You Try to Return to a Normal Life
When I shot straight up in bed at 7 a.m. thinking “oh s***, I’m late heading to the track.” But then I realize it’s the day after Sick Week 2025 is complete.
My Facebook and social media timelines are starting to show stuff other than Sick Week updates from competitors and Sick Warders, photos from all the photographers, and I feel weird. Yup, my first ‘drag-and-drive hangover’ of 2025 has started.
Did you miss Sick Week? Want to join Sick the Mag for our next event? We have THREE drag-and-drive events for 2025: Sick Summer: June 15-20, 2025; Sick Michigan Miles (including our first time for Junior Street and Motorcycle inclusion): August 10-17, 2025; Sick Smokies (featuring a large turnout of Gassers): October 13-19, 2025. Want more details? Visit the Sick the Mag events page: https://www.sickthemagazine.com/events
Luke Nieuwhof wrote about how we can fall into a little made-up world when doing a drag-and-drive, and I got to see both sides of it back in 2022 when I did my first Sick Week event. Being a typical male, I injured myself about a month before the event.
The ensuing pain led me to do the drives on Sick Week from track to track alone, and I didn’t follow the specified route until the final day. I rolled back to my regular job on Monday, and the normal grind probably masked my ‘drag-and-drive-hangover.’
Fast forward one year, and now Tom has hired me to work for Sick the Magazine full time. Instead of driving my own car, I’m rolling in a Dodge Durango sporting the ‘Sick The Mag’ colors and a windshield banner.
Most of the time we had 3-4 people in the ‘Sick’ Durango, and the conversations were spirited. We also followed the routes almost excessively, which meant stopping for broken down competitors, checkpoints and longer days versus the Google “shortest distance between two points” approach I took in 2022.
The final day of Sick Week 2023, Friday February 17th, is when lack of sleep really started to smack me in the face. I had a front row seat on the struggle bus. But the excitement of the final day, crowning winners and seeing who would survive the week was my “energy drink” to power through it all. Yes, I did supplement that with an actual energy drink too!
The next morning felt like a blur. I got up at 7 a.m., did the same panic “I’M LATE” that I’ve experienced several times on the ‘morning after’ a drag-and-drive event is over. But as tired as I still was, I couldn’t fall back asleep.
My head was spinning with everything I was fortunate to see and talk about in those last six days. The rest of the day disappeared in a two-hour drive back to Gainesville, and I fell asleep earlier than I had in a little over a week.
Fast forward a couple days, and it feels weird. I’m in the process of reading all the recaps from numerous participants on Sick Week and Sick Ward as well. My head fills with all the late nights, the cruises, the checkpoints, the calls for broken parts to fix allowing a competitor to just “finish the week.” It’s official; I’m in the ‘drag-and-drive hangover’ phase.
Alex Wagle wrote a solid answer to my comment “The drag-and-drive hangover is real” on a Facebook post back in 2023 on how to “beat that hangover” – “Place 8 ounces of VP C16 (fuel) in a cup and sniff it throughout the day. Change your rear tires twice every day, and any sleep over 2 hours is a complete waste of time.”
This year, it was more of the same, stretched out even further by the two additional test days before Day Zero, and the final day being on a Saturday instead of a Friday. That screwed up my sense of where I was on the day of the week, and when I was taking my son to school this morning, I initially thought “why am I taking him to school on a Sunday?”
Welcome to the first ‘drag-and-drive hangover’ of the 2025 season. How long do I have to wait until the next event?
Written by Derek Putnam. Photos courtesy of Sick the Magazine, 1320 Video and Chris Story Foto.
If you have thoughts / feedback / ideas, please e-mail us at derek@sickthemagazine.com