Drag Illustrated Issue 125, September 2017 | Page 62

I t was a little after one o’clock in the after- noon, Mountain Time, of course, on Saturday, Au- gust 5th, 2017, when one of drag racing’s most talk- ed about and highly antic- ipated contests popped off. Despite a pair of torrential rainfalls late in the morning, a sizable crowd packed into Denver, Colorado’s be- loved Bandimere Speedway to see 16 of the world’s fiercest drag racers go head-to-head for a winner-take-all purse of $100,000 - far-and-away the largest offering ever in the his- tory of doorslammer drag racing. As the national anthem conclud- ed, fans, racers, crewmen and the like remained standing as drivers Steve Matusek and Daniel McK- une were given the orders to put fire in the pipes of their respective 3,000-horsepower, supercharged first-generation F-Body Pro Mods. In the moments before reaching up 62 | D r a g to the switch panel of his Jimmy Rector-turned ’68 Camaro to spin the engine and fire the ignition, the significance of the occasion - the first eliminator pair to take to the quarter-mile for the inaugural Drag Illustrated World Series of Pro Mod (WSOPM) presented by J&A Service and benefitting One Cure - was not lost on Matusek. “I’d gone through the run in my head like 10 times at that point - everything I l l u s t r a t e d | DragIllustrated.com from starting the car, hoping the starter engages, making sure the car is in forward gear, in low gear, to doing the burnout and staging the car the same way I had through- out the week in testing,” admits the Lenexa, Kansas-based driver. “It’s not unusual; it’s a just the process of reaffirming the sequence of events. It’s one of the great challenges of driving, trying to control that which is in large part uncontrollable, and maintain your faculties in what is perceived to be a high pressure envi- ronment. Honestly, that’s what is so addicting about driving these cars and competing at this level, and when you throw in the fact that it’s the biggest race in the history of the class, a moment when Pro Mod is the undisputed star-of-the-show, well, it has a significant impact on the atmosphere - for everyone, but especially for the drivers and the crews.” Perhaps nowhere was the afore- mentioned intense atmosphere more abundantly apparent than on the faces of the men (and women) associated with each of the teams invited to participate in the first- of-its-kind drag race. Not afford- ed the privacy provided by flame retardant head socks, helmets and visors as the drivers involved in this first-of-its-kind drag race, crew men and racer’s wives collective anxiety exuded from a sea of best-effort Issue 125 WORLD SERIES OF PRO MOD