- Race Coverage
- Qualifying
- The Rest of the Story
Words and Photos by Bret Kepner - 5/15/08
Once again, the Flowmaster ADRL Drag Racing Series packed the house at South Georgia Motorsports Park. Bringing National Guard involvement and presentation sponsorship from the Hardee’s Restaurant chain, the combination of ADRL’s management, SGMP’s phenomenal track preparation and a massive field of the nation’s best outlaws, records were exceeded in three of the association’s four professional divisions.
Despite temperatures over ninety degrees during daylight hours and corrected elevations which easily topped three thousand feet above sea level, one hundred fourteen competitors from twenty-one states managed to produce record bump spots for two of the divisions.
Diversity was also key; no less than twenty-seven different body
styles were represented in Pro Extreme, Pro Nitrous
and Pro Xtreme 10.5.
this issue, it has always been DRO’s objective
to cover all aspects of Flowmaster ADRL events.
Here, then, is “the rest of the story”.
The event’s biggest controversy was provided by eventual Pro Nitrous Eliminator winner Billy Harper and teammate Dennis Radford. Harper’s new Viper, fresh off its 3.92-second blast at the ADRL opener in Houston, began the race in the ADRL’s afternoon test session with an early shut-off timed trial which included a brutal 0.982-second sixty-feet elapsed time. Harper returned to hit an exceptional 3.94/185.69 with an even quicker 0.978 sixty-feet ET. The only timed trial from Radford’s ‘70 AAR ‘Cuda was a 4.06/181.15 initiated by a 1.008 “sixty”.
In Friday night’s sole qualifying round, Radford clocked an obviously erroneous 0.919 “sixty” which resulted in a 3.98/180.55 run which was disqualified on the basis of the suspicious launch, eight hundredths of second quicker than on his test run with, appropriately, an eighth-mile elapsed time also eight hundredths quicker. Harper followed seven minutes later with a blatantly unbelievable 0.887-second sixty-feet ET and an impossibly quick 3.829 eighth-mile at 187.05 mph. The Kentuckian’s run was also disallowed and even Harper’s crew admitted that the culprit was, most likely, the engine’s ballistic blanket holding the staging beam open by hanging below the three-inch minimum ground clearance required by the association.