Drag Illustrated Issue 129, January / February 2018 | Page 58

DIALED IN
on the verge of aging out of the class, she still
races the original car she started out with six years
ago and loves it as much as she ever did. “The
first time I ever made a pass in that car I came
back to the pits and said, ‘I want to go faster!’”
Hailey’s fondest memory to date was her very
first win during the Jr. Dragster Shootout at
Farmington, which she achieved late in the season
during her inaugural year in racing. On the night
she won her first race she walked into the tower
to give them her tech card for the following day’s
event, and that’s when she spotted it: a giant
check hanging on the wall of the tower, which
read, “Jr. Dragster Winner.” She blurted out with
enthusiasm, “Hey, that’s my check!”
“It felt pretty cool going back to the trailer with
a big check on the golf cart,” she beamed. When
Hawkins got home she hung the check on her
bedroom wall, where it remains to this day. In
addition to her Farmington victory, she’s also
collected wins at Darlington Dragway and Union
Dragway, both located in South Carolina.
As for the launch of Camryn’s racing career, she
was slightly more reluctant to get involved than
was Hailey. Camryn was still cheering, playing
basketball, taking karate lessons and dreaming
of modeling gigs well past her 12th birthday, and
SISTER ACT
we’re accustomed to...it’s not racing,” Camryn says.
Her big sister, Hailey, whole-heartedly agrees.
“Sometimes when I make a pass in my race car,
it gives me an adrenaline rush! Other times it
makes me happy...and sometimes it makes me
mad!” she snarls, with an intense look in her eyes.
Regardless of the emotion that racing evoke s,
the Hawkins sisters wouldn’t want to replace
racing with anything else they know of. Curiously
enough, the girls’ love of race track life represents
different things to each of them. “Hailey is the
social butterfly who floats around and visits lots
of different people at the track. Me, I just like to
hang out with my daddy,” grins Camryn. It was
actually Wayne who suggested Camryn paint her
race car “Tangelo Pearl in color”, a suggestion
met with approval. If Wayne has a preference on
something, you can just about bet that his shadow,
Camryn, is on board with it as well.
Understandably though, since Hailey was
the first born, she was also the first to get some
seat time behind the wheel of her very own Jr.
Dragster, a 2006 Half Scale that she acquired at
age 12. Her car is very well-known because of its
trademark pink roll cage, and even though she’s
Southern Outlaw Top Sportsman
Series Enjoys Surging Car Counts
By Van Abernethy
T
he Southern Outlaw Top Sportsman
series has been consistently exceeding ex-
pectations since day 1, beginning with the
Saturday afternoon when the fledgling group held
its very first event at Virginia’s Colonial Beach
Dragway in 2006. What was anticipated to be
a 16-car eliminator was instantly increased to
a 32-car field and has never looked back since.
Demand has always seemed to exceed supply
for this group, and that’s a trend that has yet to
reverse itself, even after 11 seasons. Gary Pitts,
who’s served as president for the Virginia-based
door car group since its inception, routinely gets
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I l l u s t r a t e d | DragIllustrated.com
calls from tracks they’ve never visited – with an
invitation to pencil in a race date. “We try to hold
12-14 races per year, and some of the tracks that
invite us are a little outside our core area. It’s
just too hard to travel there in a single day and
complete the race,” Pitts says.
Holding single-day events has always worked
favorably for the club members, many of whom
own businesses and work long hours. “All of our
races are one-day events, unless we’re trying to
make up a rain date, in which case we’ll stay over
for a second day,” explains Pitts, who is also a rac-
ing member of the group and fields a competitive
Chevy S-10 truck. The amount of racing that’s
available in a single day has always been an at-
tractive feature to members of this club, since they
are also competing in the hosting track’s regular
Super Pro bracket race. “We’ve had plenty of club
members over the years leave the track with a
pair of trophies and two separate purses after
winning the club race in addition to the regular
bracket race. We’ve had racers win our deal, plus
take home an Iron Man trophy before.”
The Southern Outlaw Top Sportsman series
even offers a separate “back-half ” race for those
who don’t qualify for the 32-car field. “Obviously,
they can enter the track’s regular bracket race, but
we also offer the back-half race so that nobody
gets left out who wants to race with us, and in
this particular race they can still compete against
other Top Sportsman cars, instead of going up
against a 7-second car or a dragster,” says Pitts
Issue 129