IN JUST OVER SEVEN DAYS, Mark Micke will be strapped into
Jason Carter’s 1978 Chevy Malibu, bumping the twin-turbocharged, steel-bod-
ied machine into the stage beams for the first round of Radial vs. the World
eliminations at promoter Donald Long’s Lights Out 10 at South Georgia Mo-
torsports Park. Flash bulbs will flutter as fire shoots out of the headers and
Micke inches closer to unleashing the big-block Chevy-powered beast down the
infamous Valdosta eighth mile. ¶ But right now, Micke is far from the chaos
of Lights Out 10, where an incredible 75 Radial vs. the World entries will fight
for a spot in the 32-car field. He’s just finished strapping down the Malibu
in its trailer for the 900-mile trip from Micke’s M&M Transmission shop in
Jefferson City, Missouri, to Valdosta. It’s Saturday evening and the rig will roll
out Sunday morning, while Micke will fly down
Wednesday morning after handling final-hour
transmission and torque converter service and parts
requests from his numerous drag radial customers.
“This is a busy time with Lights Out coming
up,” Micke says. “That’s one of our core groups
of customers. Everybody is getting ready for that
and we always have guys calling with last-minute
needs. A lot of guys are testing before the race
too, so they could tear stuff up and need parts,
so it could be a crazy week before we even get
to the race.”
Truth be told, there aren’t many times when
Micke and the M&M shop aren’t busy, especially
over the winter. Between the winter series races in
Bradenton, Florida, aggressive preseason testing
schedules and a full winter of racing overseas in
the Arabian Drag Racing League and Bahrain
Drag Racing Championship, Micke and his team
stay active servicing their customers through the
bitter-cold Missouri winter months.
“The business has changed,” Micke explains. “It
used to be that November, December and January
were everyone getting their stuff freshened up
and working on new builds because the season
usually didn’t start until February and it usually
quit around November.
“Now, hell, we have guys here in the U.S. racing
until early December with the Snowbirds,” Micke
says. “We do a lot of stuff for the guys racing in the
Middle East, and they race in December, January
and February. We’re wide open getting them what
they need, then most guys here in the states are
ready to start testing the first or second week of
January. We don’t have a lot of off-time.”
The pace at M&M Transmission has been
steadily trending in this direction for over 20 years.
The business started in 1996 with a customer base
made up of a mix of local racers and everyday street
car owners. As Micke’s racing program evolved, his
transmission business followed suit.
“We started out and have always been small-tire
racers, from the Outlaw 10.5 days to the begin-
ning of drag radial,” Micke says. “Drag radial cars
82 | D r a g
I l l u s t r a t e d | DragIllustrated.com
IN ADDITION TO THE PRIZES FROM
HIS MONUMENTAL VICTORY AT
THE INAUGURAL $101,000-TO-WIN
SWEET 16 RACE, MICKE’S TROPHY
COLLECTION INCLUDES PRIZES
FROM HIS CHAMPIONSHIP SEASONS
IN NMCA AND ADRL COMPETITION.
were really our mainstay. That’s what we knew
and we knew a lot about those cars. We were
really good at it.
“Then we started getting into the Pro Mod
scene,” Micke adds. “We raced a Pro Mod and won
an NMCA championship in Pro Street in 2008
with our own car. That kind of got us going a little.”
With a firm grip on his small-tire program,
Micke continued to develop his offerings for the
burgeoning Pro Modified market. He credits a
working relationship with Pro Line Racing and
co-founder Eric Dillard for helping put M&M’s
Pro Mod development program on the fast track
starting in 2013.
Issue 142