This past Saturday marked an important milestone in street car drag racing. It was officially reborn. To use the hackneyed phrase one more time: “This changes everything.” Charlotte’s new state-of-the-art zMax drag strip has been open for a while, but this past Saturday, April 25, marked an important milestone: it was the first time zMax has used all four of its quarter-mile lanes at the same time for the same race.
Although the initial intent of zMax’s planners was to hold such an event, no promoter actually has had the stones to pull it off, until Rich Christensen of "Pinks" and "Pinks: All Out" fame pushed hard to put it to the test. Last Saturday, Christensen and the Speed Channel crew pulled it off while taping what will probably be the most widely watched episode ever of "Pinks: All Out."
How successful was it? To give you a hint, the zMax facility pre-sold over 20,000 tickets to an event that otherwise features your ordinary, run-of-the-mill street cars. Folks, the NHRA would love to sell that many tickets to a national event with Fuel cars, and maybe this is the wake-up call they need to understand that drag racing needs to fulfill a very basic need: entertain folks, and they will come.
Incredibly, Popular Hot Rodding was the only major car magazine on hand to document the entire thing, and next month we plan on bringing you full coverage of the four-wide, side-by-side mayhem that marked the first time in 40 years this kind of racing has been done.