LIGHTS OUT VIII
PRESENTED BY
Donald “Duck” Long march-
es to the beat of his own drum; a
way in life he prefers. The Duck
is brash, flamboyant and about as
politically incorrect as they come,
but also very successful.
Almost a decade ago, Long
became a pied piper of sort
leading an obscure group of drag
racers into the mainstream of
drag racing conversation just by
the very nature of how his races
are conducted. The cars he has
made famous began as a hybrid
of a high-performance street
vehicle with the beastly engines
often found in Pro Modi-
fied-style vehicles. For the
majority of the last 10 years,
Long has welcomed any and
all racers, with virtually any
make, model or chassis style
of race car, to make their way
to South Georgia for what
amounts to a no-holds-barred
shootout where the great
equalizer is the mandatory use
of a D.O.T.-approved radial
rear tire.
Long’s races are a throw-
back to those ultra-successful
Bill Doner-style promotions
where there are nearly as
many people standing on the
starting line as those seated in
the stands and hanging on the
fences hoping to get a glimpse
of the volatility these race
cars offer.
At the current pace of his
uber-successful events, two annu-
ally at South Georgia Motorsports
Park located outside of Valdosta,
Georgia, which regularly sell out,
Long is quickly vaulting himself
into a legend the like which hasn’t
been mentioned since the legend-
ary Doner and his 64 Funny Car
events of the 1970s.
“Wow,” said Long, in response
to the Doner reference. “That’s
pretty flattering, that’s for sure.
You know...I try my best at this
deal - you know that. I try to do
all that I can to get everyone down
here, and everything I can to get
people excited about it. It can be
hard sometimes, and sometimes
you rub people the wrong way,
68 | D r a g
but I hope everyone knows that
it’s just all part of the show. It’s all
part of trying to put on a show.”
While Long is quick to deflect
credit for putting this style of rac-
ing on the map, citing the racers
as the ones responsible for the
excitement, he will accept credit
for giving them a big stage to
showcase one of the more exciting
racing trends to come across since
the Pro Modifieds of the 1990s.
“I think that Radial racing
would have still been here, you
know what I mean, without
me or anything like that,” Long that I think that they deserved.
We took the role of the underdog,
and they showed they had teeth,
and that made them the big dog.
“I just felt as a promoter I
needed to be that kind of front guy
who was willing to say and do the
things that needed to be said and
done, and be as unpredictable as
their cars were. I knew I had to
get people to notice, and once they
did, it would do fine on its own.
We had to convince those first 300
spectators at the opening event;
they couldn’t miss the next one.”
Promoters are in the business
explained. “I think that to move it
to the next level; I think that we’ve
definitely helped in doing that for
sure. I think that anybody that
would put the time into it could
do things. It’s just, you have to be
willing to sacrifice a little bit of
your life to be able to put that kind
of time in it.”
Long says the success of his
Lights Out and No Mercy events
have been successful because of
his willingness to eat, sleep and
drink these events 24/7 and 365
days each year.
“Things obviously, they evolve,”
Long said. “But I think in the
beginning it was Pro Mod or Pro
Street and all that kind of stuff
getting the attention. I feel these
radial guys didn’t get the notoriety to make money, but for Long, the
passion to be successful meant
more than the financial reward.
“Believe it or not, I actually
was donating money,” Long said.
“In the beginning, I was actually
just paying the track [to have the
events]. Even when I was doing
my own race, I wasn’t even taking
any of the money in the begin-
ning. I was just donating money
from my company. It was a hobby,
which is what it was, it wasn’t
like I wanted to really make any
money off of it. But then it became
so time-consuming that I had to
look at it as a business instead of
a hobby. I realized somewhere
along the line I needed to make
someth