Drag Illustrated Issue 139, December 2018 | Page 62

DIALED IN
Garry “Hooter” Hoots sponsoring the low quali-
fier award for both categories.
“Back when this deal was first getting off the
ground you had guys like Tommy Mauney, Ronnie
Hood, Frank Teague and many other standouts
from the area competing in this event, and it
was a very exciting time,” says Joyce’s son, Mark,
who’s had a long affiliation with Farmington for
more than four decades.
Few people can say with certainty that they’ve
attended all 35 Big 5 Shootouts at Farmington,
but Mark certainly has in one capacity or an-
other. “I was here for the first one, which stands
in my mind as the most memorable, and then
after my dad passed away in 1986, my mother
and I were still here running the track for quite
a few years,” Joyce says. “After we sold our inter-
est in 2002, I started participating in this event
as a competitor.”
These days, Mark finds himself calling the ac-
tion from the tower as the track announcer. He
also serves as the headlining sponsor for the Big
5 Shootout through his T-shirt screen printing
and graphics business, MJ Printing. Each year,
Joyce supplies every single Big 5 participant with
a T-shirt, decal and giant trailer check for the
winners. Famously, the event T-shirt prominently
Big Fun at the
Big 5 Shootout
Farmington Dragway’s time-tested tradition shines on
F
armington Dragway’s Big 5 Shoot-
out is among the most celebrated events
held annually at the eighth-mile facility
located near Mocksville, North Carolina.
The track celebrated its 55th anniver-
sary in 2018 and counts the Big 5 Shootout as
its longest running event, alongside the leg-
endary December Flea Market and Free-Entry
bracket race, which were all started in 1983,
along with the Big 5 Shootout.
The event was founded by then-track owners
Jerry Joyce and Norman Drouillard on the belief
that fast bracket racing was the wave of the future,
and they couldn’t have been more spot-on with
their assumption. The Carolinas are known to
produce a slew of extremely fast participants for
the Top Sportsman and Top Dragster divisions,
which would both be launched a few years later,
and many of those future stars would come up
through the ranks of the Big 5 Shootout in the
early-mid-1980s. What Joyce and Drouillard
noticed 35 years ago was a growing number of
5-second bracket cars in the area, so they orga-
nized an event to celebrate their performance
with a 5.99 or quicker dial-in-style drag race. The
first event in 1983 drew 16 hot cars from the area,
and was won by Tommy Mauney, who was driving
the familiar 1981 Reese and Anderson Camaro,
originally built for IHRA’s Modified category.
The race was an instant hit for Farmington.
Afterwards came a two-year win streak in 1984
and 1985 by future IHRA Top Sportsman world
champion Frank Teague, who continues to reign
as Big 5’s only back-to-back winner. While a num-
ber of people have won the event twice over the
course of its history, Teague’s two-year dominance
stands as the only competitor to win the event
two years in a row.
As cars became faster and faster, a separate
Quick 8 race for both Top Sportsman and Top
Dragster were also introduced to go along with
the bracket race, with longtime Farmington friend
features the previous year’s Big 5 winner, and also
lists every single driver who’s ever won the event.
The Big 5 Shootout isn’t what you’d call a “big-
money race,” but it’s still among the most pres-
tigious, time-honored events in the state. “The
big-money bracket craze came along a few years
later and it certainly affected the attendance of
this event,” Joyce says. “I’d say it probably peaked
in the early 2000s with car counts nearing 200.”
Regardless, the event continues to be a highly-
anticipated event for Farmington, and still carries
a high probability of producing a first-time winner,
just as it did with the most recent running when
Michael Paschal from Pleasant Garden, North
Carolina, took home top honors. Mocksville’s own
Chad Tilley emerged victorious in the Top Sports-
man Quick 8, while Thomasville, North Carolina’s
Durant Cottingham won in Top Dragster. The
Whitlock brothers, Ron and Russ, each took home
a $100 check for their low qualifier efforts in Top
Sportsman and Top Dragster, respectively.
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I l l u s t r a t e d | DragIllustrated.com
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By Van Abernethy