Lights Out and No Mercy...a look back
/I am only a few days away from heading to South Georgia Motorsports Park for Lights Out XIII and was thinking to myself about all the radial racing I have seen over the years. So here’s a chance to look back.
The first time I made the trek to SGMP was as a spectator in 2010 with a friend of mine Ben Donahue. We had flown from the extreme cold that is winter in Wisconsin to the warmth of the south to check out all of this radial racing. As a fan I was absolutely hooked with the entertainment value that we got to see.
Donald Long has always been known as someone who will ruffle feathers. Whether that be drivers, fans, other promoters, media, etc. I don’t think anyone is really off-limits, and that even included me in the early days. Love’em or hate him, he has done a hell of a job with keeping his name and his races in your mouth and mind.
He certainly wasn’t the first to put on races that had radial based classes, but he was really the first to put radial classes as the highlighted class of the event. NMRA, NMCA, World Street, and others all featured a radial class, but they weren’t events that were focused on radial racing. Though if you look through the archives of radial racing, you will see that a lot of the drivers that were radial racing 20 years ago still have a hand in radial racing in some way shape or form.
What you need to remember about the radial revolution that we see now is that at it’s start, Outlaw 10.5 was still the king in the outlaw world. For years it was classes like Outlaw 10.5, Super Street, Super Street Outlaw, Hot Street, Real Street, and others. Radial racing was almost a fringe type of racing that hadn’t built up a huge following. There were names like David Hance, John Kolivas, Joey Bridge, Dwayne Gutridge, Erica Ortiz, Dave Hopper, Chris Little, Chris Evans, Mustang Mike, and so many others that were on the radial train long before Donald starting holding his races.
Everyone wants to talk about radial racing and the history of it. I have had extensive conversations with drivers like Dwayne Gutridge who was around on radials back in the 90’s. Fast forward to the 2010’s and we saw David Wolfe hammer down mid 4.40’s in the Mustang and everyone lost their damn mind. We thought that was it, there was no going quicker than that. Now, we’ve seen the 3.40’s broken into. It took a decade to go from a touch quicker than Ultra Street is now, to knocking on the door of the overall quickest passes in door car history.
Next week marks Lights Out XIII (13) and we have seen trends come and go over the last decade and a half, but the staple continues to be a February and October radial race that is put on by Donald Long at South Georgia Motorsports Park. World Cup at MIR, World Street at Orlando, U.S. Street & Snowbirds at Bradenton, Shakedown now at VMP, Throwdown in Tulsa, and others. They have all become drag racing staples, they are those events that you can’t miss. Lights Out especially has joined that group of races and it’s undeniable.
I’m not sure at this point what the future holds for radial racing. It’s obvious that plenty of people still want to play in that pond, and I think as long as they are races worth going to that feature radial racing, we will continue to see it year after year. Eventually, just like everything in the sport, old becomes new again. I would love to see an old school RvW class. Real cars, no pro mods, like it used to be. Cars like Marty Stinnett, Brad Edwards, Kyle Huttel, Scotty G, and more. Fans and drivers a like would love that. But for now, here’s a look back on some classic times.
