Benoit Pigeon Posting

All of the pictures on this page were contributed by Benoit Pigeon,
I am grateful to him for the opportunity of reproducing them here.

Click on any image to get the bigger picture

Benoit's second page continues to look at the American Drag Racing League's 'Dragpalooza IX' meeting held at Rockingham Dragway, North Carolina over the weekend of 9 and 10 March 2013.
This is what Benoit had to say about the meeting :
"This was my first ADRL race ever. I wanted to renew my knowledge on Pro Mods since it had been so long since I followed the class. And it has changed a lot (understatement!). We are far from the quick 8 of the late 1980s and I was absolutely blown away by the performances. Seriously it's huge and at the ADRL there are only fast cars. In fact all the door slammers are super fast here and I had never seen this before at that level for all the races I have been to. It's no wonder that Adam Flamlhoc tried to explain how much his win is such a big deal for him during his post race comments while interviewed by Mr Nowling the promotor of the series. When coming from Europe, while most people make for the big NHRA races, I would suggest planning attendence at a race close to an ADRL event both in distance and date."
Before moving on to the pictures it is worth taking a look at the performances of some of the door slammer classes which are unknown in Europe but which were contested at Dragpalooza in order to underline Benoit's comments above.
The table below gives best elapsed times and speeds for each class.

Pro Extreme	Von Smith 3.642 seconds at 210.83 mph
Pro Nitrous	Steve Jackson 3.813 seconds Mike Castellana 197.48 mph
Extreme Pro Stock	John DeFlorian 4.019 seconds @ 180.26 mph

The Pro Extreme class certainly looks like a lot of fun although eighth mile times are not that familiar to us Europeans. If we look at Adam Flamholc's best eighth mile figures of 3.864/193.46, and the European best Pro mod quarter mile marks of 5.949/247.63; and then pro-rata up Von Smith's figures you get something like 5.6 seconds at 270 mph if he had run the full quarter mile!