LIGHTS OUT 7
Like a Boss
A
74 | D r a g
I l l u s t r a t e d | DragIllustrated.com
PHOTO: IAN TOCHER
t 3:00 PM
eastern standard
time on Monday,
February 15th,
roughly 72 hours
before the first
round of qualifying was set to
begin for the $50,000-to-win
Radial vs. World extravaganza
that is Lights Out 7, Keith Berry
and his band of merry men started
putting his NMCA championship-winning Corvette back
together. It’d been an eventful
winner for Berry and his beloved
black C5. While th rilled to string
together consecutive championships in the NMCA’s relatively
new and very popular Radial Wars
category, the writing was on the
wall – 4.0s weren’t going to cut
it. So, over the winter, Berry and
longtime friend/crew chief Ryan
Rakestraw scoured the internet
looking for a new engine; they
wanted to stick with a small
block, largely due to what they
felt to be favorable rules, but find
a bullet trick enough to provide
the power necessary to dip well
into the three-second zone and, in
his opinion, have even a fighting
chance of competing at Lights Out
7 with the best radial racers on
the planet.
“We knew that it was step up or
step down,” says Berry, 43. “To be
honest, I think I’d sell everything
and just quit before I stepped
down. So, we knew we had to
have a new combo. We wanted to
stick with the LS platform, but it
just wasn’t working out with our
timeline. We’d had a lot of success
with the LS deal, but we were
beating it to death – those cast
heads were good to like 35-pounds
of boost, but we were pushing like
53-, 54-pounds through them.
We were running out of time, and
then Ryan found this dragster up
in Canada with a bad ass 499ci
small block in it.”
After a brutal cross-country trip
from Berry’s home in Gainesville,
Georgia, to “basically Alaska” – a
Issue 109