LETTER from the EDITOR
T
wenty-five years ago, Kenny
Bernstein topped what many believe
to be drag racing’s last major perfor-
mance barrier with his 4.823-second,
301.70-mph blast down Gainesville
Raceway’s fabled quarter-mile during the 23 rd an-
nual NHRA Gatornationals. The first driver to run
faster than 300 mph, Bernstein was reborn in the
spring of 1992 as the “King of Speed” and despite
winning six NHRA world championships over the
course of his Hall of Fame career, will forever be
known for a little under five seconds in Florida.
Drag racing and performance milestones have
always gone hand-in-hand, but our seemingly ever-
increasing fascination with record setting has, at
least in my humble opinion, gotten completely out
of hand. While I don’t want to downplay the histori-
cal significance of Bernstein’s aforementioned feat,
or the innumerable barrier-breaking efforts on the
strip that came before and after, the fact remains
that most every hardcore drag racing fan can iden-
tify the date, place, time, lane and barometric pres-
sure (I’m being dramatic) when Bernstein eclipsed
the triple-century mark, yet few could identify the
Top Fuel winner of the ‘92 Gatornationals (Eddie
Hill took out Bernstein in the final). And that is
(again, in my opinion), reasonable cause for alarm.
But I get it. I do. In drag racing, winning is some-
thing that you do very little of, even if you’re a world
champion-level racer. There has to be other ways to
validate one’s efforts on the drag strip, to make all
the time, money and energy spent worthwhile—and
few things do so as much as a label like “First in
the Fives” might for Pro Mod racer Mitch Stott or
“First to 200 mph in the Quarter-Mile” for Outlaw
10.5 pioneer Steve Kirk.
For many racers, admittedly, it’s racing against
oneself, pushing the performance envelope, po-
tentially etching their names in history that drives
them, and there’s no shame in that. I vividly remem-
ber in the late 1990s legendary track announcer
Ron Leek inaccurately identifying my dad’s 1989
Pontiac Firebird as the quickest-and-fastest, small-
block-powered doorslammer on the planet and the
way my ol’ man perked up when he heard it over
the PA system. Leek was notorious for getting a
little overzealous with his salesmanship and, again,
it was likely nowhere close to being true (with an
all-aluminum 434ci and a Lenco 5-speed, the car
really did run quite well), but even after all these
years it serves as a strong reminder of what a title
or label like that can mean to a person.
We in the drag racing media, honestly, we love
it, too. Big numbers and record-breaking perfor-
mances make great headlines, excellent keepsakes
when featured in magazines, and garner a lot of
web traffic. Never mind the driver and crew chief;
it’s also huge for the car, engine and parts manu-
facturers involved. Being the first, or the quickest,
or the fastest, even among a very specific group, is
a big deal—I get it.
It’s my belief, though, that world records should
be like an extra layer of icing on the already delec-
Wesley R. Buck
Editor-in-Chief
8 | Drag
I l l u s t r a t e d | DragIllustrated.com
Wesley R. Buck
Editor-in-Chief
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table cake that is competitive drag racing. I hate
seeing entire events judged on whether or not a
record was set there. Throughout 2016 and into
this first portion of the 2017 racing season, though,
I feel like the racing community, for the most part,
has become so focused on who is going to blow
down the scoreboard, that we’ve lost sight of what
I believe is still the crowning achievement in drag
racing: blowing the doors off the competition!
Don’t get me wrong, when the stars and moon
align and conditions are right and everyone on the
property knows a world record could come at any
moment, it’s super exciting. I’ve been on hand for a
number of occasions like this and the electricity is
palpable—and I don’t want that to change. In fact,
I’m not suggesting it