59. Drag N Drive Addiction, Racecars with Trailers, Rules and Events, w/ Mike and Eric

Hello, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Minnoxide Podcast. I'm your host, Harris, AKA Minnoxide, man of many automotive aspirations. Okay, I got a little confused there, we made it work. And then I'm here with my co-host, Dan.

Yep, I'm Dan, we're with Gunnit Garage, and we are here to take everybody beyond the meat and get a chance to meet some of these people.

All right, and today we have the Drag N Drive Addiction, guys, so you guys go by Drag N Drive or Drag N Drive Addiction?

Yes.

Yes, okay, fair enough. So you guys reached out to me, I wanna say a couple months ago, maybe a few weeks ago, we were gonna do a podcast at some point, and then we ended up at PRI, which is where we're recording right now, here in the middle of Indy, which is my first time staying since Crown Rally five years ago, which is super cool. But nonetheless, I was like, hey, let's just do a podcast here at the Airbnb, because we don't know nothing about Drag N Drive. I've heard about it, I've seen Cooper Baguette do them or whatever, some videos on it. That's it, we're used to like normal rallies.

Yeah, I was gonna say, hang on now, normal?

Yeah, car rallies, you know, our rallies don't have parachutes involved. I mean, they're once in a while, but it don't happen often. So I guess just kind of tell us a little bit about yourselves, who you guys are, and then we can go from there.

Yeah, perfect, so I'll go first. My name is Mike Narciss and I own the whole, like I started this, right? So a few years ago, I attempted my first Drag N Drive event in 2020 with a community called Rocky Mountain Race Week. And we raced in Tulsa and Oklahoma City and all this kind of stuff, right? Well, that spawned this entire, I don't know, lifestyle that I live now, because this is all we talk about, which is very strange for a lot of times in automotive podcasts. It's not normal that you dive as deep as we have into a community that's got 4,000 racers in it, right? You know, start talking about drifting and things like that, that's a very small community. But this is kind of, I don't know, Drag N Drive to me is that it is a car guy vacation. And so when you start competing, like you do in the rallies, it's like that but then drag racing all out every day. So I started doing that. I started talking about it on a channel that we also own that is our, like, I don't know, my brother and I shop, that he does all of our fabrication and things like that. And I began talking more and more and more about this, and I felt bad for those followers. So I was like, I need to start a new brand, and that's where Drag N Drive Addiction came from. And so now we host two weekly live streams. On Wednesday nights, we host what we call the Drag N Drive Show, which is two hours-ish, something like that, with guests and news and stats and real deep dives into stuff. And then Saturday mornings for an hour, we do the Drag N Drive News, which is really just very rarely we'll have a guest on. Hard-hitting, fast, somebody can watch that and get the info they need very quickly. And the notes in that show are getting way better. So I'm the host of that, and I do all of the stats for the Drag N Drive community. And then Eric White is my co-host. I'm gonna let him tell what he does.

Yep, so I am Eric White. I've been a car guy forever. Had multiple project cars. And about 2020, 2019, I started a YouTube channel. It's 815 LSX Swap, so I'm a big LS guy.

Okay, now I put it together.

Yep, so I started doing that, and I was on a trip to Michigan to visit some family and was listening to a podcast looking for Rocky Mountain Race Week content and came across Narc Soleptic Customs podcast. And as I was listening to it, his guest at the time was Destroyer1320, and he had talked about a racetrack that he was at at Byron Dragway, which is my hometown track. So I was like, these guys seem pretty cool. So I got back home, I reached out to him and said, hey, I just started this YouTube thing. It seems like you guys have been doing it for a little bit. Take a look at my videos, give me some advice. And those two guys have really helped me grow a lot. So Mike and I talk regularly. We both have the same passion for what we're doing. And he just asked for help one day. And originally, when he asked me to help with this Drag N Drive Addiction show, he said, we'll probably rotate co-hosts throughout each different episode. And it's been, next week will be a year, and I've been the co-host the entire time.

Yeah, it was really a great setup because he really understands a lot of the backside of stuff, the production side of things, and keeping comments. Doing a live stream is way different than, we've done several podcasts, but doing a live stream is different because people are commenting in the chat, right? So you gotta keep up with that. Well, as I have to almost read notes, which I don't have tonight, so I'm gonna ramble a little bit, so I apologize about that ahead of time. But if I'm not reading notes and I'm not going to do that stuff, he can keep the comments going. He can also put me back on track, which is a big plus for this stuff. So he can keep everything moving on the backside. Then also, he's kind of our graphic artist. I mean, he does a lot of our design work and things like that that come on. So I have all of these ideas and these thoughts, and this stat world is brand new, really, for the Drag N Drive community. Nobody's ever gathered all of this data together in one place. So now that we're looking at it, you start looking at 10, 20 years. It must be the 20th year for Hot Rod Drag Week next year. So you start looking at 20 years of history that nobody's really dug into as deep as what we do. So I can nerd out on all of that, come up with an idea and say, hey, I wanna talk about this. Here's the car, here's the owner. This is what I wanna talk about and he can come up with some really great artwork. So it's really been a great partnership for us to take this thing to the next level because you know it better than most anybody. It's hard to do this by yourself.

Yeah, oh, absolutely. Having a co-host helps so much too. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm able to do it on my own, but having someone like Dan, who's arguably will have more hands-on with vehicles, really helps me with the more technical type of people. And we have some interesting guests coming on that I'm gonna need some help with. So did you design that hat then?

Well, so we actually, Fiverr was a huge win for me for a while, you know, because I've ever used fiverr.com, but we hired someone to do it. This is the hat I'm wearing is for the Drag N Drive World Champion, which we're gonna talk about in a minute. This is an entirely new process. So yeah, we basically had these hats. This is a basic hat from us, just with Drag N Drive on the front, and Summit Racing is our sponsor, one of our sponsors. And so it's on the back, and I figured it had this big panel. Man, we had to do something. And so we awarded the Drag N Drive World Champion yesterday. And so if you're gonna give them something cool, you gotta give them a hat that they can wear all the time. So that's where this hat comes from. So if everybody's watching this, yeah, thanks.

I was just curious. I had to ask, but for some listeners, since we're a little bit further in, let's kind of jump back a little bit. So what is Drag N Drive then? Because like I said, it's very similar to rallies, but not really.

Yeah, so Drag N Drive racing is like drag racing, but cooler, okay? So imagine you are driving along, you trailer your race car to the track, which happens every weekend at every track across the country. Well, we take it one step further. We load all of the supplies and the parts and pieces that you feel like you're gonna need for the time you're gonna be on the road, and that is you are contained to your car. There's no support vehicle at all allowed on these, and you're driving your race car from track to track. What separates this from most things like a true street or a road rally is the mileage. So you're looking at 50 to 100, 300 miles some days between tracks, and you're racing the next day. Well, a lot of our events don't allow like what you would call a street tire or a hard tire in our community, what we talk about. And so you have to change over from street tires to drag tires or race tires, whatever. So you're carrying those race tires with you. So not only have we seen really cool cars get updated with, like a lot of people may drive on their street tire and then carry those in the trunk. Now we're seeing like full out builds of trailers becoming this whole next level of drag and drive. So you're essentially racing every day to establish an ET average, and that determines the event standings. So it's not about your, I don't know, it's not about your fastest pass of the week, which is typical for drag racing, or your heads up for drag racing. It is all about getting your best average across five days. You're either your fastest average because you can have, just like, you know, you guys have been to the racetrack, you can maybe run like a 9.0 one day, but if you run like a 9.60 one day because traction isn't there, now your average is a 9.30. You're probably not gonna win that class if you're that far apart. So we take those standings, we gather those up across all the events, and that's what we talk about all the time.

Now making it to the end, though, also is a big part of it, right? So if you're really pushing your car hard, you could, if you blow it up in the first couple of tracks, then you're in big trouble in any way.

Plus, you're 400 miles from home.

Right, yeah. Well, rallying for the way we rally is a similar thing. I've been very far from home and had a very broken car, so yeah, it's not fun.

So what I've learned in the rally community a lot of times is it's a phone call to the tow truck, or they're getting a ride back to the original place to grab their truck and trailer. In this, though, the difference in drag and drive racing and a lot of other road rallies and things like that is these guys are fixing them. They're fixing them inside. We've had guys do complete engine swaps in Cole's parking lots. Like we had a guy named Jason Hurley who has won the last three Rocky Mountain Race Weeks that has a 7.02 second quarter mile car, 200 miles an hour changed from his 3500 horsepower twin turbo big block into a carbureted big block so he could make the last 400 mile drive back to the house or back to the original track. So it's just that next level. It's that next evolution of like taking what you love, which obviously we love cars. That's why we're here. But also like now you get to wrench on it. And a lot of times it's funny because a lot of people don't want to do that. They want to have a fast car, but if it breaks, if it's not what they think it is, they put it back on the trailer and they go home and they fix it, right?

They bring a whole support team and everything.

Yeah, this one here, that's like the drive between the tracks is where Drag N Drive makes the most sense because it's 300 like-minded people nomadically moving between racetracks, just like car rallies are, road rallies, getting that hotel party, that parking lot beers and trailer burnouts. That's what we say all the time. So trailer burnouts have really become a big deal. And it's just all about not just the drag race, but out in the world. And if you're in a small town, which we drive two-lane roads, which a lot of the rallies do as well, you're seeing parts of the country you would never drive by. Why would you take that if you're trying to get to the beach to get to the family vacation? You're on the highway at 91 miles an hour. Now you're on the back road at 55 in your race car.

And generally speaking, there's not money involved for winning these events. So car guys are doing this for the pure fun of it. They get to drive their race car, which we talk about all the time. When you think about your typical drag car, you get in it and you drive it for six seconds or nine seconds or whatever it is, maybe four times on a weekend. Well, now we're taking these cars and we're getting in them, we're driving them. We're going to get ice cream. We're going to do burnouts. Like those are the things that we enjoy seeing is people enjoying the cars that they built rather than having them sit in the garage and only taking them to the track every weekend and making a couple passes.

Yeah, I'll tell you that's, I gravitate more towards road course because I've done some drag racing stuff and to sit in the car for 10 seconds race and then get back in line and wait for two hours, sometimes or an hour, that gets a little frustrating for me. But man, I do love it. It's the acceleration of it is great. So doing something like this would be just absolutely a blast.

It kind of fills that missing gap, right? Like I feel like you would really enjoy it. Because again, it's like a four day event. There's some competition involved. I could just see you and Mark going at it.

Yeah.

That would be ridiculous. I mean, if you guys were the same power level, of course, but whatever.

Right, so do you guys rent, do the tracks get rented out for just these events? And then is there usually typically an entry fee, kind of like in that same thing what we do with the road rally?

Yeah. What does the entry fee usually look like?

Yeah, so anywhere from 300 to 500. So a lot of times less expensive than some of the rallies that I've been on. Yeah, yeah. You know, as rally cost went up pre-COVID, I began to be outpriced. You know, we were looking in the $2,000 and $3,000 range to do a week-long rally, and that became unobtainable. What's funny though is a lot of these guys, when you sign up for a car rally, hotels are taken care of. Hey, we're gonna eat here. Hey, this is what we're gonna do this day. All this kind of stuff. Well, for us in the Drag N Drive community, no hotels are set up. That doesn't cover any of that, because you don't ever know where you're gonna be. So there's like two levels of people. There's some folks that carry a tent in the back of the car in case they have to sleep in the parking lot. Yeah, right? There's some folks that will set up hotel rooms six months in advance. This is where we're gonna be. For me, I'm carrying the tent in the back, and I'll book a hotel room at 3 a.m. in the morning to sleep for two and a half hours, which we've done in the past, and because there's no reason, because I don't know where I'm gonna be. So that'll be a good story. We'll tell that story later why we had to, I paid for two rooms that night in two completely different cities.

Now, speaking of at night, I saw some of these videos. Do some of these cars don't have headlights, or they have stickers where headlights should be? Is that a thing that we can or cannot disclose on the air?

So what's cool about these is we're taking race cars and we're making them street cars again. So for most of these events, you have to have working headlights, taillights, blinkers. Some events are even becoming, you have to have rear view mirrors, outside mirrors. You have to have wipers on some of them. Horn, yeah, horn is a big thing. People don't ever think about a horn on the race car, but you gotta have a horn on the street car.

And that's all it takes to make them street legal again, right?

In a lot of the states we're looking at. In a lot of the states we run, yeah.

Yeah, because that was a big question, because I saw a sign at PRI, and it's like, oh, five second car on drag week. I was like, what the hell, a five second car?

Yep.

So what do you typically see? Is it a range of vehicles, I guess?

Yeah, what's really cool that we've noticed since all of this is the fast cars get all the attention. It's always, that's how it is, all this stuff. Well, the largest group of cars, and I haven't done the math for this year, but for 2022, the largest class was 10 and 12 second cars. So a car that you can literally take a late model Mustang, throw a Whipple on it, and now suddenly you're running low 10s consistently without having to have a cage, you can take that car and drive it everywhere, right? So we're seeing a ton of growth in those sectors, and those are the guys that are having the most fun, to be honest. The guys that are running sixes and sevens and low eights, that's a hard car to campaign, because you really, you're not driving on your race tires at all, because they're big floppy slick tires, you know?

And another up and coming class has really been the stick shift. Stick shift has grown.

Yes, crazy growth.

Yeah, in the last couple years, I mean, you know all the statistics, but really, it's been evolving like crazy. We've been seeing so many stick shift cars. You know, one of our buddies is at PRI with a booth and Bang Shift Billy, and he's got products designed specifically for those stick shift cars. So that's another class. And it's a lot of fun to watch. Those guys are wild as they're banging through gears and the car's bucking around, but it's a lot of fun to watch.

Bang Shift Billy or Bill Armstrong, he drives, doesn't even own a truck and trailer, drives his Fairlane 65 or 67, I think it's 65 Fairlane everywhere. 20,000 miles a year, 10,000 miles a year, pulling a trailer, makes 1,500 wheel horsepower, small block Ford, stick shift, six speed, cruises everywhere. I mean, that's what this style event has done. Those guys would typically always have a truck and trailer, and if something broke, they'd be scared, and they would just load it up on the trailer and take it back home and fix it and come back out and race later. That's not the case. These guys have had, like Rich Guido is the Canadian, Chuck Norris. We awarded him with one of the Drag N Drive Ambassador Awards because he drives from Canada, he put 25,000 miles on his car this year, and it makes 1,300 horsepower, 65 GTO, stick shift car, 1,800 RPMs at 81 miles an hour, pulling a trailer, just crazy, big block Pontiac. I mean, it's really one of the coolest cars that's out there. And those two dudes race each other all the time. They're like best friends and arch enemies. But the stick shift class has been crazy. We've seen cars used to, a 10 second stick car was fast, and you broke stuff a lot. Now we're seeing Chad Feigley has possibly, he currently holds the fastest stick shift average at an 803 across five days in the middle part of the country in September, like 1,000 miles worth of driving, raced this Corvette every day, and his average for the week was an 803. It's just absolutely intense, man. So it's just really cool to see those kinds of cars and be able to walk up to that guy. That's why I like drag racing so much, is it's a pit pass every time. Those guys just want to talk about their cars like all the car guys do.

At the end of the day, it all turns into a parking lot party, right? That's what we always joke about too, with the rallies. You can get us fancy hotels, you can do whatever will be in the parking ramp, in the parking lot, hanging out, drinking beer out of the trunk. That's how it always ends.

That's exactly right. Yeah, and the cooler game has been on the rise lately. We've seen a lot of trailers built around this really cool cooler in the front and stuff like that. Having to fix something on the road, when we did rallies a lot, it was a lot of higher-end cars. Those guys aren't, you're not gonna go to O'Reilly's and buy an alternator for an Aventador or something like that. You can go to O'Reilly's and buy a alternator for a 65 GTO.

So you can get plenty of Mustang parts, though, that's what I rally with. So a couple of hub assemblies I've had to do on the road, parking ramps, you know, begging somebody to give me a ride to O'Reilly's to get some parts, yep.

Yeah, electric scooters have saved a lot of folks. Yeah, it's pretty cool. And we're seeing that we saw some huge growth this year. 11 events in 2022, 33 events in 2023 across the world. It's absolutely crazy to think that there's more than 4,300, I think, 4,300 racers participate in events this year. It's just, just hands.

Man, that is crazy. I mean, the racing industry is alive and strong, man.

Oh yeah.

I feel like we're in the golden era right now.

I'm telling you, this is the good old days. We're gonna look back in 25 years and be like, wow, we lived in this because every segment is growing. Everybody is doing something cool with cars.

I think we're just getting further along with technology too. I mean, right, they had to, they had to dumb a lot of things down because of the EPA. Then we changed the technology. We figured out how to squeeze the horsepower out, sell meat emissions, cars are now, you got Chrysler 200s with 200, 300 horsepower. I mean, it's like just a little V6s and stuff, just cramming out stuff. So yeah, it's great time. I mean, it's fun.

And with social media, the reach that everybody has, I mean, like you live in Minnesota, this goes on here. Like I live in Arkansas, we're at PRI right now, but if we weren't, we'd be doing this over Zoom or whatever we used to get that done, right? And you wouldn't have done that 20 years ago. There's just no way it was gonna be possible.

Yeah, I always tell people, since I started this YouTube channel, I talk to people like Mike every day, other car guys all across the US. I talk to them more than I talk to people in my own town. And it's like going to the track anytime you want. I can pick up my phone and talk to Mike about car stuff any time of the day. And like you said, 20 years ago, we would have never met.

It's really crazy. So I'll give a little bit of history if you're cool with that first thing. So Hot Rod Drag Week began, Dan and I were talking before this about One Lap of America. And that's what kicked this off. Like Frye Burger saw that. He went on that event a couple times.

Give a little background on what that event is.

Yeah, so One Lap of America is essentially a road rally where you're gonna... And some of those tracks are 600 or 700 miles apart. And so these guys are gonna drive their race car to each of those tracks for seven or 10 days. Something to that I can't remember the day count. But they're gonna race every... They're racing to get the best average across all those tracks. Well, Frye Burger took that because he's a drag racer and then added the whole element of drag racing every day for your average. So he basically took the plan from One Lap of America and worked it into drag racing, which is really cool. So 2005 drag week, there were 40 something cars and the fastest guy won with an 850. Like that class now, there were 35 cars at any drag and drive you can talk about, but mainly Hot Rod Drag Week this year. There were 35 cars in that class that ran in that 850 class and the top six cars had an 850 average, or 85, 85 average, sorry. The winning guy had an 850, it was the first time in history that anybody ever do that. So at different tracks, I mean, that's what you gotta understand. Like these guys are, there's 300 cars having to make passes at the track. So you gotta get in where you fit in. Then you gotta make enough passes to keep your average low. And the 850, like any index or class like that where you can't go faster than that number is so tight with tuning windows and things like that. I love the 850 class because that's a car you can get in. It's got a single door bar that goes down. You can climb over it easily. And that car still looks like a regular car. A lot of times you move faster than that. You're doing carb in your fiberglass fronts. You've got some Lexan windows and things like that.

What are you seeing in that 850 class? So like, give me the top five cars. Are we talking late model stuff or with classics? Is it a mix of everything?

Yeah, it's everything. So currently, Dustin and Steve Trantz own the record in that class with the 2005 Mustang. 2005? Yeah, 2005 Mustang that has a Turbo LS in it. Everybody knows Turbo LS is like the way to go, right? But they've got Turbo 4.

I mean, it is, unless you put in a Mustang in there.

Right? So they were one of the first. Maybe it's newer than that. It's an S550 car. So it's newer than that. Whatever your model that is, I can't believe I can't remember that. It's not an S550, but anyways. So they've built that car. They built it specifically to race in that class. So that's the number one car. You've got Brian and Jay Acton, who are one of the most fiercest competitors in that class. They run a 70 Nova. There's like Randall Reed runs a Fox Body Notchback. I mean, there's a little bit of everything in that class. Rick Steinke runs a four door, 67 Malibu. Like big car that he runs 850s. There's all these cars, and that's what's cool to me about the 850 class is they are still all cars, because like you can probably do that with 1,000, 1200 horsepower, something like that.

And we just had the 860 index at the NHRA, and there was what, eight cars there?

Yeah, special invite only, and that's gonna become a new class. It's called NHRA Street Legal. And so it's gonna be an 860 index. So they'll be racing towards an 860 without going any faster. But that's an 850 in Drag N Drive. So it's still a little bit of outlaw stuff. This is probably more in-depth and your folks will care to listen, but I'll explain it. So if you are CAGE certified to an 850 in the quarter mile, you cannot run faster at an NHRA event, NHRA sanctioned event, or you'll be booted, okay? That's why NHRA always has like a 610 index or an 860 index which is coming. So those guys can run like an 857 and not get kicked out. Drag N Drive is a little different because they are private track rentals, and we don't only use NHRA, we use NHRA, IHRA, WDRA tracks. And so you are racing, but you're not submitting your time. Each pass you make, you only turn in the time you want to. So let's say you run, I mean, dude, how many 848s, 849s did we see come through at drag week, and they can't turn those times in. You can't turn a time slip in faster than what you're limited to, right? So these guys are making multiple laps, trying to get that time. And that's probably, I don't know if that's gonna change. We can get into deep dives and thinks, my thoughts and theories and stuff. But as we move forward, I think we're probably gonna see some times back up a little bit to kind of match some NHRA things. So yeah, 850 cars everywhere. It looks like a regular car. They could be in a parking lot with regular factory wheels on it, and you would walk right past that car and not even think anything about it.

Wow, yeah, so what about, oh, nice voice crack, what about strategy? Is there a little bit of strategy to how you attack each track or to survive the week?

Yeah, so there really is two very, very different strategies that go into this. One, the first thing is just like you said, survive.

Yep.

Right, so your car Ragged Edge may run 850s, 852, 855, but that's the ragged edge of what that can do. So you may back it up and survive the weekend in 865, but you made the week. And that's where Eric's talking about. They're not being cash. There's like these bragging right trophies, essentially, that are given. I mean, they're like for Drag Week, it's a plaque for other events like Redwood Rally, which you gotta go by that booth tomorrow.

Yeah, we swung by today.

Oh my gosh, I love that trophy. It's like a hand-cut fallen redwood trees that they cut those trophies out of.

We'll have to check that out again tomorrow.

I saw it sitting there, but I thought it was just part of their display. I did not realize it was the trophy. That is awesome.

Yep, so it's really cool. And one guy does all of their trophies. I mean, it's really neat. So we're seeing a lot of this really creative stuff, but these guys aren't racing for money, which makes things a lot more fun, because you guys know once you start putting money in and everybody gets really, really competitive, things become not fun anymore. And so Drag N Drive has always done a really good job at not bringing in anything that makes it that next level. Because again, we talked earlier, it's a car guy vacation is what it really started as. But with this point series that we created, we may have created a little bit of a monster.

I was literally just gonna say that. I'm like, did we just ruin that now?

We probably did a little bit for some people. But the cool thing is with so many events, it truly is a way for people to go out and hang out and really enjoy the time between tracks and still make drag race passes. And I'll tell you, from my own experience racing in them, I'll make more passes during a drag and drive event than I will make all year. Because I'm there, I'm able to make two or three passes, but it's the same thing you were talking earlier. If there's too many cars, you end up in the lanes for two or three hours, and that's no fun. So as a media guy, I hung up my driving suit, and my brother does all of our racing now, and I just record everything.

You ride along with him then, or you take a separate, like?

Oh, I take a separate car, because I like air conditioning. Air conditioning, and something that will go 97 miles an hour when I'm trying to catch somebody so I can get that cool rolling shot as you're driving past.

So there's a couple types of drag and drive events. We break them down into national and regional level events. So a national level event is going to be five days. Four. Four days. And then your regional is going to be like a weekend style event, so three days. And then that is really where people kind of get their feet wet. So they'll do like a Friday, Saturday, Sunday type of event, and then you get hooked on it, and then you want to do that next level. You want to do a week long one. So we kind of call that our...

Gateway drug? Yeah. That's a gateway drug into drag and drive. Because like you start thinking, you guys know it. I mean, what's a week long medium level rally cost now? 2,500, three grand probably?

Oh, week long, no. Those are in the 5,000, 6,000 range.

Yeah, for a pretty high end one. You probably could find one for three if you really shopped for one. But yeah, they're getting up there.

That's crazy. And that's four nights somewhere you're taking a real trip, right?

Yeah.

So this kind of thing, you're going to spend 3,500, four grand, and you're going to sleep in some crappy hotels. You're going to eat gas station food for four days in a row. You're going to be dehydrated. It's this is very, very hard, but man, it really is the most fun. Saying it out loud to guys that aren't in it, I think we're making it not sound fun.

Yeah. I feel like you also just described our week at PRI so far as well.

Man, I don't know. We've had a cheeseburger each day. That's all we've eaten. And then had breakfast at the hotel, which is crap as well.

There's some people that walk out and hike out into the woods with a tent on their back and sleep out there for three or four days and they think that's fun. So it's all in what it's relative, right? I mean, to an ultimate gearhead car guy who likes to wrench on his own stuff, you got to, pardon the pun, throw a wrench in things sometimes and challenge yourself a little bit. And I think that's what's really great. They make fun of me all the time for a couple of times. I broke down on rallies, but I pride myself in it. I had a multimillion dollar guy that was running a rally with us and come up and just was shocked that I was changing the belt on the front of my car because I blew it. My supercharger was over spinning a little bit, blew a belt, and he was just shocked that I was able to do that stuff. I think it's kind of cool, you know?

Yes, rally was that.

It was when we were at Erie.

OK, I'm caught up.

Basically, when you guys told me to go nuts, and I basically had to hold track of myself, and I was just whipping donuts and s***.

That's right. Yeah.

And with Drag N Drive, so he mentioned changing engines on the side of the road. I don't know how it is with the rally stuff, but if a racer drives by and you're on the side of the road, they're going to stop and help you. They're going to offer you parts. They're going to offer to help you. So we do have a signal system. So if you don't need help, you give them a thumbs up when a car comes by, they'll keep going on their way. You give them a thumbs down, they will pull over. But I mean, you will see a number of cars on the side of the road. And I mean, they'll stay for hours until you can get back on the road. That's the best thing is everybody wants everybody to finish the event. You know, it could be Mike and I in the same class, first and second. And if he breaks and he's in first, you know, I'll pull over and I'll give them parts out of my trailer or whatever he needs to get his car going so that he can also finish.

Yeah, it's really one of the last what we feel like is really the camaraderie is what brings people back. Just just well, same thing, parking lot beers, you know, hotel parties, you know, things like that. And then but those parties happen a lot of times in an O'Reilly's parking lot at 1 a.m. And while somebody's pulling the head off, you know, we had had a couple repairs this year where people were using like plug, you know, 110 plug in welders that they bought at Harbor Freight to reweld cylinder heads so they could get back on the road and grinding them smooth with flapper disk and things like that.

So dude, that brings fond memories. You remember, I think you were on this ride when James had the E 55 AMG and he was fixing his like fuel tank in the back in the parking lot.

He wasn't. Well, he was trying to put it back together because what they did is so they we were coming into town and I think we were on a time system them or they thought we were. So when you got to the next checkpoint, they were worried about being they were going to be there first. They were running low on fuel and this guy had a tank of race gas in the back seat of his car. So his co-driver climbed to the back seat, tried to pull the back seat to pull the get access to the driving to pour these. These boys are a little crazy. Oh, yeah, I'm just saying. So I think he was doing was trying to put his stuff back together because they tore it apart on the road. That's what I was trying to fill the tank from the inside the car with race fuel.

Yeah, nice.

I'm sure is a little volatile.

Oh, and smell. You know, I can't imagine you and you're back there. He's driving the legal speed limit and you're trying to pour it in the hole that was for the fuel pump.

They aren't small guys either, man.

Yeah.

His co-driver is about my size. He's trying to crawl in the back of the sedan and then pull the seat up.

Yeah.

I can only imagine.

Yeah.

That's the kind of stuff we get into here.

Yeah. So the reason I asked a little bit about strategy, I think I was watching your channel a little bit. So, okay, what is the typical amount of passes that people will do per track? Do you have any data regarding that?

No. And so that is the next step, right? Because we're seeing like a guy named Greg Jones, who is an awesome racer, runs in the 12.0 index. So it can't turn into pass faster than 12.0 in his Nova. He will make, in one week, he won the class in Rocky Mountain Race Week when they raced earlier this year. He made 15 passes that week, okay? Five days of racing, 15 passes total, wins the class. He comes back to race week, which is Rocky Mountain 2.0 we call, and he made 12 passes in one day to get his best pass. So literally the same guy may make 15 passes in one week and he may make 45 passes in one week. Our buddy Zach Stevens was at the award show yesterday, and he is the number one 12 second racer across all events. And he made 17 passes in one day and more than 60 during the week. So there's really no like, you can't say, we always joke, it's one and done or two and through and then after that, it's over, you don't know you 60 passes is a lot. Yes. Yes. Oh my God. And to drive 800 miles between tracks, getting fuel, getting food, all that kind of stuff.

Yeah, it's got to be a real hard one. I mean, let's say you can switch back and forth on tunes or do something like that.

It's a rough one. And so guys will have their street tune quote unquote. And what we're seeing a lot of the growth has been dual fuel systems. So they'll have like instead of where what they used to do was they were taking race cars with 10 gallon fuel cells and they were draining all of the race gas out and putting pump in it to drive on the street. Well, then they would get to the track, drain all the pump out, put race gas in it to make their passes and stuff. Well, you guys know you start mixing fuels and your octane's not there. We were seeing a lot of engines explode, a lot of windowed blocks and things like that. So now people are developing like full check valve systems. So we have a three gallon methanol tank, 15 gallon E85 or regular gasoline, 91 octane tank that they can drive on. And then they just open the laptop and they put their street tune in or their race tune in. And so then it's just a different pump that they're turning on and all that kind of stuff. So it's really, really a neat deal. Even like Devin Vanderhoof and his drivers and his Mustang, which is a six second convertible Fox body, crazy car, big twin turbo, big block car, big block Chevrolet. They have three sets of injectors. So they have one set of injector that is just driving E85 or 91, whatever they choose, they have a flex fuel sensor in it. And then the other two run it on when they're racing. So that car makes 3,000 horsepower and.

They're just swapping that out then or?

No, I mean, it's just literally a click of the button. They just changed it all in the tune. So we're really seeing some really race car cool stuff in that next level of of racers, so.

And then going back to the passes, depending on the event, some events require one pass to be submitted per day at each track, and then some require two. So some tracks you might have to do minimum of two passes. And then like like he said, Zach doing 60 passes. I mean, we were watching him just hot lap it. He'd get down to the end of the track and then he'd be back in line and, you know, he'd make another pass right after that. And he's a, his average is a 12, 0, 0, 8, 9, 9.

So across eight drag strip passes at four, three different tracks. So you start at one track and you end at the same track. So it's, you know, track A, track B, track C, track A is our format.

So does the route change every year? Like how do they do that? Yeah.

And so for events like Hot Rod Drag Week, they change complete tracks. They'll move to different parts of the country. But we're seeing a lot of events now like the Sick Week or Sick Summer events for Sick the Magazine. They race the same tracks every year, but they'll change the order. They'll change how you do. They'll change the route stops, things like that. But other events enjoy the move, enjoy the new tracks, getting to see different things and being around.

Do you get a lot of people too that just come? So we in our rally game to you got some people that like they're not there to be the fastest car on the track. They're not there to do this. They're literally just there for the camaraderie to go. They may not have the fastest car, but they just want to have one hell of a good good time. So the same thing there. You got somebody that aren't showing up in any expectations. They're going there running some, you know, runs down the track and then they're getting in and they're just there to hang out. Oh, that happened pretty often too.

And then we also have for some events, you know, like Sick the Mag, they have Sick Ward. So what that is, is essentially you are part of the event. You get into the tracks, you park with the rest of the racers, you go to all the route stops, but you don't get to make any passes. So a lot of people, if they don't get into the event because there's only a number of spots available, then they'll sign up and they'll just do that Sick Ward or something like that to where they can follow along. They're at the same hotels, they're at the same checkpoints, they're in the pits, they're hanging out. So that's definitely something that's been growing with a lot more events as well.

So we don't have like assigned hotels, but we have host air quotes for people listening. Host hotels, so the promoters, which we host our event, we have two different hotels in Springfield, Missouri that we recommend to our guys. So they don't have to stay there. But like with car rallies, that's part of the package, you pay for all that. And everybody stays the same, you book 70 rooms or whatever.

Yeah, we always explain it like it's an all-inclusive resort for car people. Same thing, exactly how you explain it. It's a vacation for car people.

But it goes back to what I was saying earlier, I don't know where I'm going to be. And I'll tell you this, there's a lot of times that I've messaged people and be like, hey, do you have an empty half of the bed that I can sleep in? I need a good shower and a bed tonight.

Or even a floor for your cot.

Yep, I carry a cot with me all the time. Anywhere I'm traveling, I carry a cot in a foldout tent.

That's right, a tent. Let's talk about that. You said you were going to talk about that earlier.

Okay, so Eric is not a tent camper. He's a little bougie compared to what I do.

I'm with you.

So it's really funny as we get together now, he will change his tune once he gets on the road a little more. He still has a full time job. I do this all the time. So I need to save a little money is why I tent camp. A lot of times, because you can really spend, you know, $150, $100 a night, seven nights on the road, $700. That goes a long way towards my monthly bills and things like that. So it's nothing for me to find a friend that's got a spot on the road, or I'll grab a cheap hotel one or two nights during the week. But the rest of the time, it's beneficial for media in my eyes to stay at the track because we're there at 6 a.m. in the morning when the racers come in and they're doing all their stuff. So you have two different trains of thoughts on this. We'll talk about this real quick. There's some events that race at night, like the Rocky Mountain Race Week team. They rent a track. They race from 3 to 11 p.m., so for media. We will work really hard and then put the tent up and edit till 2 o'clock in the morning, sleep at the track, get up, drive the next day. For events like Hot Ride Drag Week, Sick the Mag, Midwest Drags, they race in the morning, so the track will be hot from 8 to 3, and then they drive in the afternoon. I prefer night racing because one, you have more spectators, but then two, your adrenaline is to get you to the track. You're driving your 300 miles to get to the track, to get to do something, where if you race in the morning, man, you can really spend a lot of your energy doing that and then have to drive 300 miles, you know, in the hot sun. So we ended up in some several situations this year. Charlotte for drag week, there was an accident on the highway. It was like 92 degrees outside, and these guys are sitting in cars with no interior comfort at all. Literally, you know, a 212 degree transmission is under this sheet metal that's next to you, and it's radiating in the car. One guy sent me a picture of his temp gun at 147 degrees. In the car, you're in traffic, there's nothing you can do. So at that point, you really can't turn the car off. So you're kind of stuck, because what are you going to do? You can't push it. You're moving it two miles an hour average. So it's really been really cool to see the upgrades in radiator and cooling technology that Drag N Drive has brought to the entire, I would say, car community, because these cars have to live at a high horsepower level that nobody ever cared about before, you know.

What about, I guess, what's the longest one-day trip that you've seen? I guess, because if you're sitting in a 147-degree sauna, I'm curious, is that like a 25-mile drive, 100-mile?

No, no. So there's no event that has less than an 80-mile drive that I know of for each day. And that's really where we kind of start qualifying what is and isn't a Drag N Drive in our opinion. Now, this is 100% our opinion and what we track, right? So Rocky Mountain Race Week had this year for both their Race Week and Rocky Mountain Race Week, it was a 420-mile drive one day. Now, one time, you raced in the morning and they had to be in... So in Kearney, Nebraska, they raced in the morning, and then they drove to Denver, Colorado, which is the 420 miles, and they had to race that next evening because of scheduling. So you can only imagine trying to make your passes, get your time, so be the head of your class, and then get in that car. And it was June, and I don't know if you've ever been in Nebraska in June, it's not cool outside, so 106 degrees, these dudes are driving in the middle of nowhere.

And then Devon with Street and Yeet comes in, all because it was a hurricane, right, that came through. And then what they did is they made a call in the middle of the event that we're not going to be able to race at this track because of weather. So they added, they moved a track, and they did two tracks in one day. So they did like a morning race, and then they went and drove, and then at night they raced again at a different track.

And it really, that was an equalizer big time. So the gentleman who won the World Champion, they had struggles. So day one, they leave, they have a flat tire. They have the car, the ignition system burns out. I mean, all this kind of stuff, they fight, they sleep for an hour, and get to the track, they have to make their pass. But in what we call a changeover from your street to race trim, you're talking about complete tire changes. Like these guys run on like a 35 inch tall street mud tire. This tire weighs 87 pounds by itself with the rim. And so they got to change that to their drag tires and all that kind of stuff. But they've got to make that entire change, fuel system changes, getting all the stuff ready, moving everything, changing everything around, resetting the bars, putting the wheelie bars on, make their pass, make, they made three passes at that first track, change all that stuff back, okay? It's now three o'clock in the afternoon. They drive, it was only 80 miles for the, or 70 miles between those two tracks. But then they had to drive to that next track to also make passes at night. They are literally pulling into the parking lot. The speed bumps in this place at the, at the House of Hook, the Carolina, I don't know, whatever, the House of Hook in South Carolina has the craziest speed bumps for a racetrack. And they punched a hole in the oil pan at the track. So not only do they have to make the changeover to get ready, now they have to fix the oil pan. So they're under the car banging on the oil pan, get it fixed up, so it's not leaking very much. Put the big like soak up pads on it and then gorilla tape around it. It doesn't leak anymore. Now they can make the changeover. They do all of that, it starts raining. So they're not going to make passes that night. This isn't the hurricane story, but this is because of the hurricane last year for Street Neat, now they're like, oh man, we have to do two tracks in one day. This is going to happen. So they make the complete changeover, get the car ready. It rains. Hey, we're not racing anymore tonight. Go all the way back to Street Trim in the rain.

And so and then that's a two pass event, right?

They had to stream each one.

But then one of our buddies who competed in or was chasing the world champion, he double entered into two classes at this event. So he had to do that changeover to it was a 235 small tire, and then he had to go make his pass. Then he had to switch over. What did he run for the unlimited 275? So then he runs a 275 tire. So then he makes another changeover, makes his pass. Then he changes over to a street trim, drives to the next track, and then does that all again. In one day.

So what is the trailer requirements or maximums? OK, so wait.

This is a good topic.

You're explaining to me now that you've got, I've got 42 different sets of tires now with me. I've got all this stuff. OK, what can I bring with me?

Well, I want to talk about Ryan and Tammy Hargan, who he's talking about. They have raced together. She's his co-pilot, obviously the wife. She packs the chute. She packs the trailer. She does all the stuff that like, like what you would call an operator, right? She is his COO of what makes things happen, right? So they were making so many passes that she literally told him, this is your last pass. You either get it figured out. I'm not packing another chute till we get to the next track. So, you know, a 230, he had never been on a 235 tire comes out. We allow for like in our point series this year, it was like, if you had to reset the record in the class for the ET. So he had to like keep making these passes to go fast, right? So never been on that tire, never had any suspension setting in that does all that gets all that done. And then they get everything finally figured out. And they end up with the two classes they had made. Man, I want to say like 18. No, no, no. It's like 28 passes or something like that that week. They had never made that many passes during the week at any of the other drag and drive events that they've been on.

Yeah, we always give them a hard time because they're a one and done. They show up first thing in the morning when the track opens, they do their changeover, they make their pass, they're on the road. Like that's their typical drag and drive. So this one was totally different for them.

And this is a seven second quarter mile streetcar. It's been 197, 30 times. So pretty crazy to think that this is their car. It's a twin turbo Coyote setup.

The higher speaking Dan's language.

Yeah, so you'll like his next car. Instead of the typical Chevrolet in a Ford, he's putting this Coyote setup with twin 88103 HPT turbos into a Camaro, like into a 71, 72 Camaro. Nice. Yeah, so this next car is going to be like a five-second car. It's going to be insane. But it started, he bought this car brand new as a daily driver and does a Whipple. He puts a better transmission, better converter, all that kind of stuff. So slowly, then it just went off to deep end.

It happens. So that's my co-pilot in there. Just got back with our pizza. That's my wife. She's the same thing. She likes going to track. She's got a car of her own. Yeah, she knows very well how things can snowball and get slightly out of control.

So going back to the trailer thing, at one time, there was a requirement for a specific size.

Yeah, you could only have... So it started with, because these guys were pulling crazy stuff like... Oh, Daphne's husband, he owns bangshift.com. Chad Reynolds literally brought like a 16-foot double axle trailer with all kinds of parts on it behind his race car, right? That was the thing. So after he did that, they were like, no bigger than a four by eight, okay? No problem. Four foot wide, eight feet long, no problem. Dudes were doing them like eight feet tall to get all their stuff in, right? So then they're like, it can't be any bigger than this cubic feet. This is all we care about. So it can't be that. So that lasted for a while. But then two years ago, Hot Rod Drag Week, which kind of runs the rule game, they basically, because they're the OG, they said, we don't care what it is. It can't be any bigger than single axle. Well, we pull in to Drag Week 2022, and they have a cabin on wheels that's a single axle trailer. They had AC in it. They had a generator. They had a bed. They had all their tools and everything like that. This guy's driving it with a, he's pulling it with a 1300 horsepower Lincoln powered Ford pickup. So pretty crazy. I mean, they made the week, and they lived in the trailer for the week. That was the whole reason they built it, but it was single axle. So it was pretty wild to see that being driven by something that makes that kind of power.

And what we've been seeing more of, and I think it's really cool, is the trailers are becoming more customized. So as people get their car dialed in, they keep it for a while, they don't need to do as many upgrades to the car. So now they start upgrading the trailer. So these trailers are getting insane, but what I think is really cool, they're starting to use the same wheels on their trailer as on their car now. So now, instead of carrying spare tires or full size, they can carry a couple maybe trailer size tires. And now if anything goes wrong with their tires on their vehicle, they can just swap one off the trailer. So I think that's been really cool.

Yeah, and a guy named Alan Whitaker, him and his wife campaigned a brand new 71 Monte Carlo, makes 3,500 horsepower. This car is beautiful. We'll send you some pictures. She can put it here for the...

Is that the green one?

Yes, pulling the sweet color match trailer. I love that car. Love that dude. He's amazing. His wife is amazing. They're great people. But yeah, he literally built that car. It was built for Drag N Drive. That was the only thing he cared about. It weighs 4,300 pounds. I mean, it's huge, heavy car, all steel, all glass. That's what everybody says in drag racing now. But this car really is 100% for him to drive around and go get ice cream and do burnouts and pull that trailer everywhere. So we're seeing that all the time now. Cars are getting cooler. Trailers are getting cooler. Matt Walter built one of the nicest trailers I've ever seen out of Harbor Freight and eBay Parts. He gets on there. He finds some deal on Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace and adds another toolbox, adds this here. But it's all becoming...

A spectacle on its own.

Yes.

Trailer aspect of it. Does anybody go without a trailer? Yes, crazy people do.

Yard sale. We call it yard sale because when you pull up to them... Because you gotta think. If you drive on your race tires, it's not that bad. But you're still gonna have a week's worth of clothes. You're still gonna have a jack in case something happens. You're still gonna have oil, oil filter, fuel filter. All the parts and pieces that if you were gonna go to the race track, you got that in the car. So a lot of these fast cars, if they do that, it's really an achievement. And within drag week, that's an extra. If you're the fastest without a trailer, that's an extra trophy. So we're seeing that a lot too. A lot of really cool trophies and things like that that come out.

So imagine you're going on your family vacation and you go to the beach and go to the beach and unload all of your stuff on the beach and then go spend the day on the beach and then get back in, load all your stuff up again, go somewhere else.

Go to the hotel, unload your bag to go inside and whatever is valuable that you don't want to leave in the car because a lot of times they don't lock. Take all that inside, come back in the morning, take it inside at midnight or 2 a.m., come back in the morning at 6 a.m. because you got to get to the racetrack, make the changeover, load it all back up, come to the racetrack, unload everything or go to the beach, unload everything, then load it. I mean, yard selling is a way to go buy a trailer. We see a lot of people make the hurdle of that, and I feel like you got to do it. It's almost like a rite of passage, and then the next time we see them, they have a trailer.

That's what I was just thinking, because I think I'd like to check out one of these events, but I don't want to put a hitch on my GT500, so I'm not sure I would do that. But we do that too when we go to the track, right? I mean, everybody's stuff is all piled.

Oh yeah, every single time. Yeah, this doesn't sound stressful at all.

Yeah, it's the same exact thing. I think that's what's cool about this conversation, because you guys understand kind of where we're coming from because of doing that. And so, it's fun. We've been doing this. I've been really following this stuff since 2020, really, and before, since I went to the first event that I attended. And it's only grown in leaps and bounds. COVID, if anything, helped us get more people's cars done. There were a lot of cars that were being built over years and years of time that nobody had time for. Now suddenly they had time to finish them, so. It's really cool.

It's completely different right now, man. I think, especially with social media these last few years, I mean, I think content production has become so huge. People have gotten so good at promoting events, and more and more people are finding out about this. Again, I found out about Drag N Drive, again, I want to say four or five months ago, like the concept of it. I was just listening to the Coupra Baguette podcast. I was watching his videos, and I was like.

Mr. Number 100, yeah.

Yeah, so I was just like, oh man, that's really cool. This is like rallies, but.

Yeah, he told me, but I was like, drag cars don't do that stuff. There's no way. That doesn't happen.

They certainly do, and they do it a lot. It was really cool. So Cooper was on our podcast one time, and he finished Sick Week as the 10th, as the 100th fastest car to start out 2022 or 2023 for our, what we call racer lists that are presented by Summit Racing. Just want to say thanks to them. They've been a huge help this year getting things done, but he was the number 100. Now we finished the year that average fell for unique racers. This is the coolest part about our list. We do not duplicate racers on that list. So for unique racers, that number is now an 870. So you have 100 racers within the Drag N Drive community out of 2,100 that have an 8.77 average or faster at the top 100. It's crazy. It's crazy to think that we're at that level. We've never had eight seconds. It's always been just over nines or tens.

Yeah, and that's completed the event.

Yeah, completed. Yeah, you have to, you know, we don't care about your fastest pass ever. We, this is at event average time, so.

And I'm curious, so what level of involvement does Summit have with you guys? How does that work?

Yeah, they're our big buddies, man. We, they sponsor, they are the presenting sponsor for our Drag N Drive show, our Drag N Drive news, our Drag N Drive racer lists, all that kind of stuff. They are the presenting sponsor for the Drag N Drive World Champion and our award show. So they're a big part of our stuff. They're also a big part of the community though. That's why. So as you become the quote unquote news source for news and entertainment in the Drag N Drive community, which is what kind of a tagline we have been using for a while now. They're part of, they race, they do these events, they bring the truck out to these events for parts availability for these racers. And so it just made sense for them to come on board.

I've ordered many of parts from Summit.

Oh yeah.

They are great. Actually, it's really funny that you say that because my son, so we let the kids go through the magazines and stuff like that and circle stuff they want for Christmas. My son brought me the Summit magazine this year and circled a couple of things he wants out of there. So he wants a NOS pillow and some other things out of there. He wants the triple tree. He wants the nightlight for his bedroom and stuff like that.

I like this kid already.

Yeah, I'm partial to him too.

He's pretty cool.

So he's seven.

The funny thing about that is the items that you just listed, we do a found on Summit racing on our Wednesday night show. And both of those items we have featured on the show as cool items for gifts or for whatever. So it was kind of cool to hear that.

Yeah.

Is there a special code that Dan should be using?

Nope, nope. We just figured out to ask. Just buy from Summit. Thank you. Yeah, it's really cool. It becomes very hard to track that as far as people using that code and the discounts, because a lot of times they have a better discount than what they could provide, like maybe our followers, because of the certain deal or special that they're offering that month or that quarter or whatever.

Yeah, if it's like Black Friday, they'll have a 30% off. It's gonna eclipse your 10% off on whatever day offer.

Yeah, and they're almost always running, like spend 100, get 10 off. They're always running deals.

It's pretty easy to spend 100 there, too.

Oh, yeah. Nothing's cheaper than 100 bucks anymore.

No.

Yep, that's awesome. I wanna ask you guys, because you guys have been walking around the show for a couple days. There's a lot of Drag N Drive cars here. Did you make it to the Gear Vendor booth and see the blue Corvette and the orange 67 Camaro, the 669 Camaro? It's kind of in the yellow hall. You need to do that tomorrow. Those two cars are six second quarter mile cars, 230 plus miles an hour. It's really a cool combo. So Dave Schroeder and John Innes built the blue car in a month because earlier in the year, they had an accident. The car flipped over. They've completely rebuilt it now. It is a nitrous, four stages of nitrous, 872 cubic inches power. Like this car is absolutely insane, and they drive it everywhere. And then on the other side, you've got Tom Bailey with the SMX Power, which is Steve Morris engine's big inch twin turbo. It's a purpose built engine. Steve Morris doesn't take another engine. He like literally carves these out of billet aluminum and makes it its own design. Every piece on it is custom fabricated for this setup and that car. Just one hot rod drag with a 657 average, number three, on our top 100 list.

What's number one at?

It's a square body S10 from a guy in Sweden that doesn't even own it anymore, and it's a twin turbo LS powered, built by Ace Racing Engines in California.

And what was that average, do you remember?

646. Yeah.

And that was across how many days?

Five. Five? Yep, in Florida. So Sick Week has kind of become, Tom Bailey says all the time, the Super Bowl of Drag N Drive Racing, because you're going to tracks. It's the first event of the season. Everybody's stuff is fresh, because they came off of Drag Week, or Midwest Drags, or Rocky Mountain Race Week, and they got their cars ready again, and now it's time to come out in February. So the air is great, the temperature is great, the tracks are great, the track's ready to make passes. And so Sick Week, we really see a lot of people throw down big time.

Is there one that you would recommend to somebody if they just want to get their feet wet?

Whichever one you can get to. They're all about 500 to enter. There's some that are 475, 450. There's some that are 550 and 600. I love regional events. One, because I host one, but then two, I feel like if you wanted to try one, there's a lot more regional events. There were 20-something regional events this year compared to 13 national level events. And so guys like you, taking a week off from work, you may have a rally that you go to every year well now, if you have one week that you're gonna do your guy's trip, quote unquote, now you've gotta not do your rally trip because you're gonna do one of these, well now you can do weekend events and knock that out. So whatever part of the country you're in, I would say grab the one that's closest to you. Or I love the Rocky Mountain Race Week family. That's probably, I mean, obviously it's what started my entire dive into all this stuff. And they do a deal where the people that raced the previous year get early entry and typically sell 70 to 80% of the tickets to previous year racers. So every year is a family reunion that you go back to that event. So I would say Race Week or Rocky Mountain Race Week is probably my favorite as of right now.

So what is it like, so you run your own event, then what's that called?

It's called the Circuit. We raced it at Mokan Dragway in Joplin, Missouri, which is southwest Missouri, one of the oldest tracks in the country. They've continuously raced 60 years, which is a pretty big deal lately. We raced it. This year, we'll race Mokan on Friday, and then we'll race Ozark Raceway Park, which you guys have probably seen on like Street Outlaws and stuff. It's in Springfield, Missouri, just south of that, and we'll race that on Saturday, and then back to Mokan on Sunday for the awards. Three days, yep.

Three, and then, so okay, three track events then as well, right?

Yep.

Okay, gotcha.

Yep, so we do a big pre-party, and this is our fifth year to host the Circuit. It's really cool. We sold out, and we did early entry, and so if you include the early entry time, which we allowed people three days from the year before, or the wait list, or early list, sorry, people could submit that they wanted to get in early. So I submitted all of these links, sent these people individual emails. Hey, this is your link, this is your passcode to get in to everyone that signed up last year and raced with us. Then I sent it to the early listers, and then we opened it up to the public. And by the time we had opened up to the public, we had been three days live, and it sold out in like 12 minutes or something like that once we got it live.

But what's the sellout? How many participants?

150. So enough, that's enough for me to handle. You know, it'd be the biggest event I've ever hosted. So we sold out at 100 last year in about 30 minutes and added another 25 and sold that out in about 15 minutes.

Man, that's crazy. It reminds me of the Crown Rally days. I remember one year they opened it up, and again, 150 tickets at 35, 100, 4,000 a ticket sold out. I want to say it was less than 24 hours, crazy.

Yeah, it's amazing, man. I love it. People are digging car stuff, you know?

Yeah.

So yeah, so we'll do that. I'm excited to be on Route 66. Last year, Eric came down for the event. He's kind of obviously my right-hand guy, helping a lot of that. But we rode Route 66 from Joplin into Oklahoma for about 120 miles, I think is what our route was there, and then turned, and I'm from Northwest Arkansas, and we always do ours for charity. And so I have been working with the Northwest Arkansas Children's Shelter for 10 years. And so we went by the shelter with these cars, right? So we had 100 cars participate, 125 sold, 100 cars participated, it's about normal. And so we took these 100 cars right through the parking lot of the children's shelter, which kids lost their mind. Then we did a cruise night and we drove back to MoCAN the next day. So this is the first time we've done three days of racing in a row. And we're one of the events that require two passes per day to be submitted.

And were you previously doing less events then? Was it like only like two track days? Okay.

So there's no track in Northwest Arkansas. And so I knew it was gonna be the last time we were gonna stay and come south. And so since we had hosted events for 10 years, I figured it's time to kind of branch out, do some new stuff, meet some new charities and things like that. So that's why we will have the charity selected this week that we're gonna support for this next year with the goal of raising $10,000.

And who did you support this previous year? What was it again?

Northwest Arkansas Children's Shelter. So it's kind of that median place, like if a child is abused or neglected, then they go to the shelter for their interviews and maybe have to stay a few days or three months until they find a good foster home. Or they go back to their parents. I mean, it's what the goal is all the time, but sometimes that's not the case.

Yeah, that's pretty cool.

Yeah, it's really a lot of fun. It gives people an opportunity to do something that we love. Obviously we love cars, but it gives them an opportunity to do something that's maybe just a hair more important than just racing your car.

Yeah.

So a portion of each of our ticket sales goes right to the shelter, and then we obviously do raffle tickets and all the fun stuff, and we have sponsors that come on board, and part of their money goes to helping the shelter and all that kind of stuff.

And one of the cool things about the circuit is your scavenger hunt. So that's something that was a huge hit last year. In fact, people were getting really competitive in this scavenger hunt.

Yeah, it was really crazy. So as you're driving along as a co-pilot, there's not really a lot to do, especially with some of the routes we were running, like 120 miles on Route 66. There were two routes off during that trip, but it's the same road. Like, there's nothing, okay, turn right, and then in 120 miles, turn left. There's not a lot to look for. So we developed this crazy scavenger hunt, which we had done as a standalone event. We used to call it the Road Rally. For a good three or four years, we ran this just as a standalone event, and I thought, man, I'll do this as a one-day deal. They'll get the slip with like 80 items on it, and each one is worth points, right? I thought, we'll get 800 points or something like that, no big deal. And we'll do it. We did a cruise night Saturday night, so we could all hang out in the parking lot. Bless you. We could all hang out in the parking lot together. And so these people were running around the parking lot finding stuff on this list that I would have never thought. So the winner ended up at like 1,750 points. The second place was like 1,450 points. I mean, it was nuts. So we gave away some cash and all that kind of stuff for it.

We did a similar thing like that for a rally we did one time, and it was really cool because what they actually did, our scavenger hunt, was items that we then later donated to that we were at like a veteran's home or something.

A little car show.

So it was kind of neat. They were like, you know, find us a thing of lotion or pencils or markers or whatever, you know, and they needed to bring it there. So yeah, that sounds fun. And that's one thing that, like I said, my wife is really good at, so that's what her co-pilot, you know, she's got to find the riddles or get the picture or do the scavenger hunt stuff. It's kind of fun.

Yep, and it gives people a reason to, because of last year's event, we didn't have anything between, we didn't have a second track day. Now, it'll be different this time because it is going to be more stressful because people will have to make their passes and get on the road. But this one allowed folks to kind of spend some time around somewhere looking for like a bathtub. Okay, that's not hard to find to go to Lowe's. Well, now it's worth 10 more points if you find a bathtub outside.

It's worth another five points and it's got water in it.

Yeah, you know, so like you kind of, you can do all that nerdy, dorky, dumb stuff, but it allows those people to have a little more fun and a little more time, so.

Always did that in my rallies. I mean, it wasn't like a physical scavenger hunt, but we'd be like, oh, you have to find the frog. And then people would always find like the, okay, we had one where we had to find like, I think it was a lamb or a sheep or something. It was supposed to be like a painting or a statue or something. Some dudes went to an actual pet zoo.

Yes.

And I was like, well, it's not the one we were looking for, but they're not wrong. So then we had all these people trying to finesse the system. I've been bribed before by your best friend.

Yes.

It's like, it's ridiculous.

Yeah, bribery works, as long as it's a donation in our world. That's the way we feel. It really is. So what got me, and typically you would have to be the guy looking through all the pictures to verify stuff, but I made a mistake. I was like, oh, a life-size statue of an animal is worth 20 points, because I had seen them on making my route for the drive. But if you find more, it's worth five points for each one. Somebody had like 300 and something points of these statues. They were stopping every like five or six miles. There was a husband and wife team. She almost got in somebody else's car, because she's like, he won't stop. So she went crazy with it. He went crazy. He was like, I thought she was mad. He's like, she was mad at me, really mad at me for doing that.

Yeah, I've almost gotten people killed on ours. I take a picture with a live bison. That's the brightest I've had ideas. Google got really close. Yeah.

So, you know, then it becomes, it's at one level more of competition. They want to be the ones closer to the bison. They want to be, yeah. They're not fine with taking a picture just out from the car window.

Yeah, like another funny one was like a gopher. I remember, again, your best friend, once again, just doing like a selfie with a gopher, and it's like a quarter mile away. I'm like, how do you know?

Yeah, how do I know that's a gopher?

So then we get to these politics and negotiations. It's just ridiculous. But so you mentioned earlier on in the episode that you do this full time now, then.

Yeah.

So explain how that kind of goes.

Oh man, woo hoo!

And before we jump into that, how are you doing on time? I know you mentioned you might want to go to this meet tonight.

We got plenty of time. I think we're good till probably, yeah, about another 35 minutes.

All right, yeah, keep cooking.

Yep, so essentially for the last eight years, I worked for a large retailer. I worked for a vendor of theirs, right? So I was in logistics. It was easy. Monday through Friday, eight to five is a great corporate job that I could have stayed at for 25 years and been no problem, made great money. Well, then I found this Drag N Drive thing, right? So last year, 2022, I had not taken a lot of time off leading up to that. Two trips a year, like a normal corporate human being. Then I find this, well, I had accumulated an extra three weeks of vacation and had four from all this time, spent every day, seven weeks of vacation in one year doing these events, talking about these events, going, traveling, driving everywhere. That changed my entire life because now, I can't go back to just having four weeks of vacation. Well, I thought I had five because I had been there seven years. So I thought, oh man, this will be cool. I can make five work for what I want. Well, then I found out I only have four. Well, there's five major national events that you gotta go to, and I needed to spend some time with my wife and kids and take them on a vacation, which we didn't do in 2023 because I quit my job in July. But essentially starting early 2022, when I knew that this was the end goal, we started kind of putting some money back, paying some bills off. And once we had like sponsors like Summit, Molly Motorsports, Howard's Cam, Sweet Patina, and Racing Junk come on board, I took that sponsorship money and we made it do things that it needed to do. And that allowed me to have like this six month window of runtime between savings, less monthly bills, and the sponsorship money gave me the opportunity to leave that corporate job and talk about Drag N Drive all day every day and live 20 hours a day. I live this 18 hours a day. I talk and think and try and figure out what the next story is, you know?

So yeah, I really do. I was watching your channel. Again, I threw it on in the background while I was editing photos or something stupid. And I was like, man, it's just, the way you're documenting and telling the stories, you really get to know the drivers. For example, the pro charger that blew up, you're doing that story and you're explaining the whole thing. That was really cool.

Thanks.

Because again, from an idiot looking outside, which is what I consider myself, it's very insightful knowledge. Because I had, again, up until four months ago, I had no clue what this event was. So it's super cool because you're taking this education approach, but then also for the people who have been doing this for 20 years, they're able to keep up with their buddies across the nation.

That's right, that's right. And there's a lot of YouTube channels of people that document their trip during this. There's very few places you can go and find the kind of data that we are providing, which moving forward will be important. Nobody cares right now. No, it's not a big deal right now, but it will be because we will find out these stories, like guys like Clark Rosenstengel who has raced 18 different events, Tom McGilton who's raced 18 different events. Like nobody knew that until now. Some people probably had an idea, but nobody, it was not hard documented. This is what's going on. So that really kind of nerds me out a little bit. As far as finding those stories, and not just a story, but like to be able to document the history of this, this is really a movement that can in the future be, I'm not gonna say the next NHRA, but there's gonna be some stuff that comes from this that will change drag racing for the better because of the cars that are built to do this, six and seven second cars making 3,000 horsepower to drive on the street. You start talking about fuel pumps, and you know this, fuel pumps to make 1,000 horsepower used to, that was, you had to have two or three pumps in the tank. One was going out all the time. Now you can have one pump that can, like a brushless pump is perfect for this stuff because it can spin at a very low RPM, spin a very high RPM and provide a lot of that kind of, the flow you need to make 1,000, 1,500, 2,000 horsepower in a car that will drive every day. And you were talking about electronics earlier. It's only grown so much more because now you can't just take a race only ECU system and it won't live on the street. It doesn't understand how to idle in a McDonald's parking lot at 2 a.m. when it's 87 degrees outside and the AC is on. It doesn't, that does not compute in a race system.

Well, I think that, I mean, at least from the chatter that I hear when I'm on the track is, I feel like that's what, car guys almost roll their eyes to the guys that show up with the big fancy brand new trailer and roll their car out, and then they do the hits like, I want to drive my car to the track. That's what I always hear from the guys, right? So like, I feel like that's a way more badge of honor. If you're doing it the way you're doing it, you're talking, you're driving from track to track, you're doing that, it's a whole nother level of, you know, it's more skill.

It's a bad a** sport all around, dude.

Yeah.

When I saw this, I was like, these f****** lunatics.

I'm telling you, it's crazy. And then, you know, so we had, there are, for our Drag N Drive ambassadors, is what we call them, we awarded those yesterday at the award show. Like Rich Guido, again, 25,000 miles a year in a 1,500 horsepower car, drives it everywhere. We had Dustin and Don Cottle race a Turbo LS, 800 horsepower Chevrolet Love that's the size of the table that's in front of us. Like, can you imagine two grown dudes? And like, it's not even this big.

One of my dad's first trucks was a Chevy Love.

Yes, so now take that, drive it all over the country. Eight events he attended this year, eight Drag N Drive events, plus a lot of other racing. And Phil Balmaceda, this guy drove a ZR1 Corvette that's low, I mean, slam, drove from Houston, Texas to Alaska for Alaska Speed Week, spent a month on the road getting to Alaska, and back, absolutely insane, does seven events this year, I'm sorry, did seven events this year in that car, 20-something thousand miles on it. Like, these are people that are nuts, they're crazy, they're crazy, I mean, and we love it. Because like, then that guy can give us and the entire community what he liked. What, why did you do seven events this year? Dustin and Don have, that probably puts them somewhere in the high teens, low 20s, as events that they've done. Like, that is a lot of knowledge, just event knowledge about what to do, what not to do, what a racer is truly looking for. Like, why do they keep going back? Why did they do three King of the Open Road events this year? Well, was it because they could have won a Triple Crown? I don't know, you know, like those are the kind of things that we're trying to think of.

What's a Triple Crown? I think I have an idea, but explain it.

It's exactly what you're thinking of. So, you know, the fastest racer across three events. So companies that have multiple events have an opportunity to do things like that, but very few racers are going to be able to attend. Like King of the Open Road, Jared Holt, who has an amazing Supra. Real Street built that car for him, still tunes and builds it. He does a lot of World Cup final stuff. He runs King of the Open Road because he loved Drag N Drive events so much. Started an entire brand to do it, but they're weekend stuff. So they drive on Friday, they do heads up elimination racing on Saturday and Sunday. So it's not in our eyes, it's not a true Drag N Drive, but that really is a Drag N Drive because his minimum mileage is 200, and then you race. So you gotta be able to do that. So the Triple Crown, I feel like if Jared doesn't do it, we're gonna sponsor that for them next year, and it'll be the fastest car, the fastest average at three of their events. I think they're gonna probably end up with five events in 2024, but three is what they did in 2023.

Yeah, that's super cool, because I know one, I think it's called a Triple Crown, whereas if a Formula One driver wins at Monaco, they do Le Mans, and then also, I think, Indy, right? I think that's the biggest Triple Crown, I guess, for any racer, right? Yeah, so that's really cool. What about scheduling-wise? Because is there a rest season, or is stuff going on all over, all the time?

Not anymore, there used to be. So used to you would have events that would run typically like May through October. Really, you'd maybe have one event early October. Now we're seeing events, Southeast Street in Iran, middle of November. Then we kick off the season with sick week at the end of January. So there's really no downtime.

Okay, so like a six week window to just chill out, rebuild your stuff. And then I guess, who has done the most events? Like, who have you seen? Like, what name comes to mind?

Yeah, total events ever. I mean, really, you're probably looking at Dustin Cottle or Tom McGilton. Tom McGilton has done a lot of national events. At one point, I know I'd counted 17 of his to do national events, starting as early as 2008 or nine. And he took, this is a really cool story. He's probably in his 70s now. He took a ZR1 Camaro, ZL1 Camaro? ZL1, I think it's still one. Yeah, he took, it had 40 miles on, and he took it and had it built, like big tire, pro street car, big fat tires in the back.

Like the newer ZL1, correct?

Yes, yeah, like this was literally had 40 miles on it, took it out and sent it to, I think Larson built that car, Larry Larson built that car, and it still has the full Camaro interior. Like it's a brand new 2017, 2011, whatever, I don't know. I can't remember the years anymore, this is bad. That's what two days of, or three days of PRI will do to you. But it has like a big block, it runs sevens, he's driven it. It's probably been on 11 or 12 different events, but he's probably pretty close to the top. Him, Clark Rosen single has done a lot. There's a really cool story. Steve Eden and Pete Holmes have driven the same car to 15 different Hot Rod Drag Week, which only happens once a year. They had only ever competed in Drag Week, and they had finished every year in the same 70 Nova. So these two old dudes load up. This is their one week a year. They're gonna hang out. It's their boys' week. They've done it every year. They skipped this year because they broke in June on their first time to ever compete at another Drag N Drive event. They break on that event. So you end up like we were talking earlier, a guy that has one week of vacation to spend with his buddies, he takes it to do an event in June and ends up not making the 16th in a row. So, but that's a 12 second car, always been anywhere from 10 to 12 seconds, but it's these two dudes that are now in their probably sixties, I would say, that are racing every year together. They're best buddies. They talk every day. They don't even live in the same town. They talk every day. Steve builds the car, Pete's the co-pilot. That's the rule, right? So like we're seeing those guys do 15 in a row. Can you imagine like spending the same week, you and Dan, the same week, the next 15 years, every week or every year, that's the week you're gonna spend together in that same car.

I think we're on four or five years now.

I think we're going on that much, yeah.

Nice.

And in the stories like that he's telling, that's some of the best part about Drag N Drive. You know, the stories of the racers and the events, or another one that came to mind is Sandra Fontaine. They just built a Mustang to do, was it Drag Week they did it? This was her father's car.

Her father's race car.

Yeah, and I don't remember how many years it had been since it had been raced, but they made this mad thrash to put it together so that she could take it on Drag Week. Her husband has a car that he raced. So it's stories like that that really makes all of this Drag N Drive stuff that we do so great.

Yeah, rewarding.

Yeah, rewarding, yep. And another thing you had mentioned with the Chevy Luv, that's another thing that's great about these Drag N Drive is going through these small towns and not driving on the interstate. We're going through small towns and stopping at local places, as everybody can talk to the racer and go, yeah, my dad had one of these, or my brother had this car. You see these cool old cars come rolling through town and everybody just gets their attention. They wanna see what's going on. They wanna talk to people. So you'll spend hours at route stops just hanging out with other racers or locals, or you'll see people that sit on the side of the road with just signs or they'll offer.

Kids are dumping water in the street from coolers and things like that, yeah.

So that's some of the greatest stuff that I've seen just since I've been in it.

Well, and that's where we've seen probably the biggest jump is in promoter ability. Like we're really having some great automobile promoters come in here and they're calling these cities and talking to the mayors and all that kind of stuff, Chamber of Commerce to tell these people, like Jared Holt does a great event. If there's ever a King of the Open Road that's close to you, you've got to do it, it's amazing. But he'll do that. He'll call every little city that's on the way. He'll talk to the police chief to get roads blocked off while a hundred cars are cruising through this area. And they have a lot of stuff to, there's a lot of high-end sports cars. There's a lot of cool hot rods. Jared does a great job with his event. I just wish he would change the format. So let's talk about format real quick, because that is something that is important to Drag N Drive Addiction. For racers to make our list, we're not gonna tell an event what is a drag and drive and what is not. But what we are going to track and collect data on is a event that is drag racing for your best ET, driving somewhere, maybe it's a loop like we did last year with the circuit, and then back to drag racing again. Those two or three or five time slips have to average out, and that is your standings. That's what we feel like. So what we saw is drag and drive, the phrase is hot right now. Big time hot, everybody's doing a drag and drive. But there are a lot of heads up events that want to do the drive, because they want that camaraderie, they want that friendship between people, because they enjoy the format. But then they want to go heads up racing, which is really cool, right? You have one winner at the end, it's really easy, and there's not really any data manipulation there. The problem is that eliminates us collecting all that data on those racers. So there's probably a lot more racers than we have, but we don't, I mean, for our racer list, I don't care about those unless they're gonna collect that data and make that data do the standings.

For somebody who wants to go, so if you have just a standard street car, regular seatbelt, no cage, how fast can you go?

11.50.

11.50.

Now some of the later model cars you can go, can you go 9.0 with stuff?

I was thinking it was something like that.

Yeah, I think you can go 9.0 with a 14 or newer car. And that would be fast enough. I mean, you're gonna run 150 miles an hour. Right, okay. So you can do that, but it's very limited. You need to look at a lot of the NHRA rules to talk about that. But typically anything old, older than let's say 2014, you're gonna need to have at least some kind of roll bar, probably a four point cage, which is a hoop, and then two down bars of some kind out the back or down the door to run anything faster than 11.50. And then after that, it becomes really convoluted. 11.50, 10.0, 8.50, and then, I don't know, you just can get all you want right there. But I love 8.50 stuff because the cage is easy to get in and out of the car. You can have removable door bars. You can take that door bar out of the way. But it's you-

It's so nice. Yeah, my buddy's Viper has that. It's just in and out, super easy.

Yeah, and so there's a lot of like Viper's that have like a six okay cage in them. I can't, no. Ned Dunphy just built a-

Yeah, yep.

And Ned Dunphy just built a brand new Viper to come out.

Yeah, yep. I'm excited to see that run in person.

Yeah, six O's at one of the events earlier this year. He was working on his licensing passes, 240 miles an hour. That car has not even been sorted, but it got pretty close by World Cup Finals, so.

Yeah, I'm super excited. Are you guys going to Texas 2K then?

Probably not.

That's not your scene.

Well, so I think it will become, there's a lot of opportunity there for us to grow with those people to bring them over to the Drag N Drive community, because Texas 2K, FL 2K, right? It's just with, I traveled 12 weeks this last year, so I've really got to kind of pick which events are important. And if I'm gone, for Southeast Street Need, I was gone seven days. For Drag Week, I was gone nine. And for September of this year, I drove to South Carolina, did nine days on the road, came back home for two days, flew to Detroit, spent three days in Detroit, then another six days on Race Week. So I was gone three weeks out of a month there in fall of September. So the wife doesn't like that very much. So I really gotta be careful. So once I start adding like Texas 2K or FL2K into that mix.

It's more things to worry about and juggle. And you gotta, yeah. That's what I was telling Dan before he started. Like you guys are in a very specific niche, and you're very big within it, which is pretty awesome. At least from the, again, outside looking in.

Thanks, we appreciate that.

There's just something to be said for that. Just being within that specific niche, because you guys have created such an awesome following.

Well, if you want to get a little nerdy about that real quick.

Sure.

So, a lot of guys talk about, the hard part for automotive car guys is we want to document everything we do. So that's what we were doing with Narc Selectic Customs, which is our builds. It was my event stuff. It was all the things that we went to. We documented it there. And that was really the reason that channel was created was to, I built a shop at my house. My brother is a great fabricator. I wanted to document those. I wanted to grow the YouTube channel. I wanted to, you know, all the stuff. One thing that was really cool about having that channel is we now have videos of my dad. We lost him in February of 20. And those videos would never exist if I had not started recording, right? Fast forward to losing him. I was like, listen, he was 62. I'm like, if that happens to me, like I got 30 years, right? Or 26 years at that point. I'm like, there's no way, dude. I'm getting to living. You know what I mean? And so we did. I signed up for Race Week, and everything's changed since then, right? Well, now we saw the light with that. That was a lot of fun. Again, I talked earlier, started talking about Drag N Drive too much, built this brand, and really like, if you niche down so deep, and you just, I'm a nerd. I mean, that's the only way I can explain it. But like, that's how we've grown, is because I've found stories that nobody has cared to tell. Steve Eden and Pete Holm, nobody knew who they were, nobody. And these guys had competed 14 times. They were the only people to ever have completed every Hot Rod Drag Week they had entered for that many times. People have done it obviously five, six, eight, 10 times, but nobody had done it like them, and in a row. Like, I don't know how you even, like that's a strategy that starts from day one. Like you have to go, hey, we're gonna do this. And just because they drive a 12 second car doesn't mean it's easy. They've rebuilt transmissions and ditches before. They've put engines in that car in O'Reilly's parking lots. They've put an axle in a racetrack one time and had to like drive eight hours round trip to go pick one up from their house. Like these old dudes showed a lot of young dudes that they had the heart that those young dudes didn't. So nobody would have known that story. So as we're telling these, you know, the family's reaching out, the family's saying, nobody's ever told their story, nobody's ever talked to them. So now I look like this big dork every time I see Steve and Pete, cause I'm like, oh my God, guys, what are you doing? You know, and now we are race car friends. I mean, like every time we see them, but those two dudes, you can't find them on social media. They finally have Facebook pages, finally, but they both carry jitterbug phones. They don't take any pictures with them or anything like that. So it's really pretty fun to draw that kind of stuff out and see that stuff and be able to, again, document the stories for these guys, because there's gonna be a point where I'm gonna be a grandfather at some point, right? I'm 42 now, my daughters are 13 and 10. They will hopefully have children in the future. I will be the old man, and they'll be like, whatever, Pawpaw. And I'm gonna be like, no, right here, Pawpaw did it. You know, I'll be able to show you on YouTube. And that's one of the biggest reasons we do this, is because of the documentation, not just the nerdy stuff that I really geek out on, but because we're telling the stories of all of these racers and those racers will be able to go back in the future and be able to show these people that they actually did it. So agreed.

That's exactly what we're trying to do with this. Like we're gonna be having some legends coming on on the podcast here in the next couple of weeks, which I'm really excited. Like, you know, old names from, you know, the 90s, 2000s, you know, people competed at a very high level. And one of my buddies reached out trying to get somebody else on. And he's like, man, we got to document some of these old guys, man, because, you know, three of the four within this space are gone. Yeah. You know, so it's like, let's get these stories while we can. It's really exciting. I don't want to disclose too much, but it's gonna be super cool.

Yes.

But because we are running out of time here, we do have to ask the usual three. And since there's two of you, it's gonna take a little longer, probably.

I'm ready. Let's start with Eric. I wasn't prepared for this. No, huh? I don't know if he's listened to any of the podcasts. So this will be fun. We'll start with him and then we'll go to me.

All right. All right, so what we ask our guests at the end of every show is you can pick three cars. You have unlimited budget and unlimited imagination. Swaps are okay. Anything you can muster up. But I need a show car, a track car, and a daily driver.

Oh, man.

So let's do show cars first.

Show car? Any car, unlimited budget.

Yeah. Okay, I'll go.

You are, yeah.

67 to 73 Jaguar XKE V12, bright red, camel color interior. That's the only car that I would own and not modify. The only one ever. Stick shift, that is my jam. A $200,000 car that I would buy and not touch.

That's a first, I think. Yeah, yeah.

Repeat it again, what was it?

Yeah, like a 67 to 73 Jaguar XKE V12, that long nose, short back, convertible, bright red, wire wheels, camel interior. V12, gotta be a V12. I'm not usually that guy, but I'm usually a hot rod guy, which we'll talk about the other two. That's my stuff. But that car to me, I don't know, it is beautiful.

Okay, so that's your show car.

Yeah.

Okay, so a tracker daily, whatever you want. Well, we'll come back to you. We gotta get some time. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So track car, I'm probably gonna do something like an early 70s Nova. My dad had a Nova when he passed. It was sold, so he had a 74. I will build one of those one day as a tribute to him. And it's probably gonna be a small tire car, 235, 275 tire, big inch turbo LS, like a big single turbo, 98 millimeter, and a huge converter. This is funny, cause a lot of the guys are listening to this will probably not understand what I'm saying, but I want the turbo spool to punch you in the face. Like I want this car to be like laggy and dumb. You don't even like to drive. It makes 300 horsepower all around until the turbo comes on. Then it makes 1500. So that's what I would like. That would be my track car. But that's probably my track slash drag and drive car. Like I'm gonna drive that all the time. It's gonna be built for drag and drive. And then my daily driver is if we're unlimited budget, I have a C10 truck, a 66 C10 truck that we've basically built to do that. But it would have a simple turbo LS, which it has now. It's got a 4L80, which is an overdrive transmission. I can drive that truck anywhere across the country. And that's what I would do it with, but it would have AC. It doesn't have AC now, and it's got a lot of rust in the rocker panels and stuff like that that we've fixed over the years. Little stuff, but it would sit real low on some 18 inch wheels and just cruise. Patina paint, perfect interior. All the door gaps would be closed and nice and not rattle like this stupid truck does. But my grandfather bought that truck in 67, and I got it in 95 when I turned 14. So yeah, it makes 500 wheel now. And if I would fix the drive shaft in it, I would drive it here. So that would be my daily. It generally is my daily.

That's on the to-do list.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. I've got to get the transmission fixed in the death cart that I have, and then give that car away, and then we're moving on to the truck.

Well, you had mentioned that earlier. You talk about projects, right? There's so, car guys, I call them the shelf. I got cars sitting in shops, right? They got other s*** stacked on top of them. Yeah, I've got, every guy's got one or two of those in their garage, right? Or anyway, a good car guy does.

We both have few project cars ourselves. All right, so I had a little bit of time to think now here. So when I think of a show car, I'm thinking something like a Resto Mod is what came to mind. So my dad has always been a Nova guy. So I'm going to go with a 69 to 72 Nova Resto Mod I want, AC in it, has to have some kind of LS. That's what I'm all about. So some type of LS, probably turbo. I think that's going to be my show car. Track car, I am a Fox body person. My very first car, I was 13. I got a Fox body Mustang. Today, I have a Fox body Mustang, six liter twin turbo LS. I think I'm always going to have a Fox body. So I think that's going to be my track car. And then the last one was daily driver. This one might seem a little odd, but unlimited budget, I don't live in Illinois. Okay, I want to clear that because this daily driver, I'm not going to drive in the snow. So I'm going to live somewhere where it's warm. I want a Rat Rod pickup truck as my daily. I want something crazy unique. I like when somebody sees my vehicle, I want them to know that that's me. So I want some gnarly big turbos hanging out the front of a Rat Rod pickup truck, slammed, chopped up.

This is something you're taking your kids to school in.

Exactly, 100%. They might not like it, but I'm going to pull up with a shifter that's six feet up in the air and all that kind of stuff.

You guys got some weird answers there. Not that I've listened to every one of your episodes for the last 18 weeks, but like that's it. I don't think those have been answered before.

No, definitely not. We just actually put out at least for the first 40 episodes. So on my website, you actually see all the answers that people have put out in the first 40. Yeah, one of my listeners put it together. Shout out to Tony. I can't think of his last name, Cran, something like that right now, but Slow Panda on Instagram, he put it together and I'm like, dude, this is awesome. So he gave us a free print, so I'm like, dude, thank you so much. But yeah, so we will update that list at some point because now we're on episode, you guys are 59. So what? That's a lot of one to two hour conversation.

It really is. And that's why I love this stuff is because you have the opportunity. I mean, like, let's be honest, would you ever have had idiot drag racers on the show, especially at the level that we're doing this? You know, I mean, I leave my job to be a, I had to even say content creator, cause like, I don't know.

It's a bit of a taboo.

Yeah.

It's weird.

I always think of yoga pants and I'm not doing those again.

The time flies. I mean, it doesn't feel like we've been sitting here this long.

We can do this for a couple more hours for sure.

Oh, easily.

Especially now you just brought up Fox bodies. I want you to notice my shirt.

Oh, I've been looking at it. But I got a feeling that you're not a LS guy, though.

Absolutely not. I am a Ford purist through and through. But I do have a small collection of Fox bodies that I absolutely love. They're one of the reasons that hooked me and pulled me in. And I moved on because I like cup holders and things that work well. So I got into the S550 game and I haven't really looked back, but I've got some collectors and stuff sitting on four posts and cars that I drive every once in a while.

Yeah, very cool.

You know, we were running around to... There's not very many Fox bodies at PRI.

No, actually, you're seeing few and few of them, I think, even at shows.

Yeah, and you know, the ones that are there are gorgeous. The one car I have noticed is C4 Corvette. Like, you'll see that there's like three of them there. There's like that Silver Time Attack and then the Land Suite car and Borowski engines. I think that's probably the next car that's gonna get hot and stupidly priced.

Yeah.

Yeah, sadly.

You heard it here, folks.

Well, yeah, I just can't imagine driving, wanting to drive an 89 Chevrolet Corvette around. Well, I want to say thank you. This has been really fun. We are, I mean, a hundred and something podcasts in of interviewing people, so we don't get interviewed very much. This has been amazing to be a part of this. And you guys, I mean, obviously I listen all the time. I've listened to, well, at least 18 episodes probably. So I got 30 or 40 hours of listening to your voice and talking about stuff. It's really cool to like meet people that do a lot of the same things we do and are into that same kind of stuff, just maybe a little different way.

Yeah, dude, it's awesome. I mean, I see it as like, I almost want to call myself a journalist, but I feel like journalists will be mad at that. Yeah, right, right. Because like, you know, people will actually have writing skills.

Yeah, yeah, I can't write. So ChatGPT, shout out to you, bud. I kind of give it a direction. I'm like, this is what I need to be at a third grade reading level.

But nonetheless, where can people find you?

Oh my gosh. So if anywhere that you're looking for stuff, type in drag dash in dash drive, and you'll come across our stuff. Drag N Drive Addiction is obviously spelled one way, but we have, you know, dragndrive.com, dragndriveaddiction on everything, but we are most active on Instagram, and that's drag underscore in underscore drive.

Yeah, I noticed your SEO is very good, too. I was able to find you pretty easily, so that's pretty sweet.

Well, and that's another reason to niche down. You know, we really got deep on this, and it's because I felt that it was gonna grow like it has, and so we really started, and we just, we bombard people with content. We had 3,000, more than 3,000 posts, plus whatever we put on.

Yeah, that's what you said. He's like, these guys are active.

Yeah, yeah.

We're on like every social media platform. I mean, we're on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube. We are less than 10 away from hitting 6,000, by the way. I just checked.

That's a jump from the last time I looked.

We're on community, we're on throttle, we're on us personally, we're on LinkedIn. I mean, we're on X, like you name it, we are trying to be there, and we are trying to post everywhere. We always say we're gonna force it down everybody's throat until they like us.

It's a good strategy.

Well, and the one thing that we see a lot of, and I know we're probably over here, but the one thing we see a lot of is people posting the same content at all places, and we definitely don't do that. So folks that follow us on Instagram will see almost completely different feed than people that follow us on Facebook and YouTube and things like that. So we feel like that one adds another level of why follow us wherever you're looking, but at the same time, like we have so many followers, like we're gonna cross 70,000 followers on Instagram probably this weekend, but we're running around the show today and we were talking about on the way over, we've posted one time on each page each day, but I have 150, 200 pictures and videos on my phone, and then you've taken 500 photos on a real camera and another 80 or 100 on his phone. You know what I mean?

It's a lot.

It's crazy to think that. So once we get home, we'll start dumping all that, but we've got a nine hour drive for making tomorrow night to get back to the house.

If you're dropping exclusive content on each platform too, you guys are busy then.

Yeah, it's very, very busy. And then, you know, also trying to keep up with the stats. I mean, that's the other thing. So the great thing about rallies is they have generally a pretty good idea of web development. Drag N Drive is not like that. Drag N Drive is handwritten time slips and names and things like that. So then I'm manually typing those in. I'm correcting one of them is Bill, one of them is William, same dude, different entries. So I've literally hand looked paper on the computer screen, making sure my lines are correct for more than 2100 racers, at least after every event. So just adding people, making sure things are right. Cause as you, I didn't even talk about the world champion boys series. We'll do that on another episode. But after we get the point stuff set up for 2024, which will come later next week. But you gotta make sure all that stuff's right if you're gonna document, you gotta make sure that Bill Armstrong made three events and his time was this instead of like maybe one time, it was William that he registered for and you missed it. So, you know, then Bill goes, Hey man, I was at race week. We were talking about, I won this teaching class. I'm like, no, William Armstrong won that one. So anyways, but again, thank you. We'll let you guys get back to your life.

I think you had your own personal handle as well, right? Like 850 and something.

Yep, I run 815 LSX swap. So YouTube, I do LS swap. So my personal car is obviously twin turbo LS Fox body. I have a Nissan 240SX with a five, three and a T56. Love that car convertible. I can jump in it, drive it anywhere. I can do drift, autocross, drag. I can literally do anything with that car. Again, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok. I've got 815 LSX swap on all those.

Yep, yeah, so we are busy. So yeah, then I have Narc-Selectic Customs on all that stuff too. So the stuff I document that my brother builds, which is, oh man, all kinds of cool stuff. If people enjoy four-wheel drive conversions on 65 International Trucks or a 67 GT500 he has in right now, he put a big brake kit on. I mean, like all that kind of stuff is all on Narc-Selectic, so I handle all of that too. So, and it's gonna cross 5,000 subscribers on YouTube this week. It's not nearly as big as the other.

We're busy.

It's a lot of fun.

But we're cargo.

That's why I do it full-time.

Yeah.

So.

I'm envious. I can't wait to get there. I'm close, but one day it'll be happening soon.

Yeah.

All right, Dan, where can people find you?

You can find us at Gunnit Garage. Again, we're trying to keep up with it all too. We're not nearly at the level you guys are, but you know, we're getting there.

That's awesome.

Yep.

Yeah, just gonna have a few more videos go viral of you dropping oil.

Yeah, yeah. It's just me messing around in the garage with the kids, and you don't know this, but in the winter time, I switched to snowmobile content, so that may not interest you, but we do that, so that's how we get our horsepower fixed in the winter months.

You guys are crazy, man.

Yeah.

Snowmobile, I'm out. One, I don't like cold weather, but then two, I don't want to run 70 miles an hour.

Well, that's how we get from bar to bar in Wisconsin. So that's the only way.

I can appreciate that. I have to make that trip up there in the wintertime.

Absolutely.

Sweet. And on that note, you guys found me. Minnoxide literally everywhere, minnoxide.com. Sign up for the newsletter. Quick shout out to our sponsor, of course, Raise a Hood. People keep thinking it's Raisin Hood. It's raiseahood.com. Basically, if you have a hoop deed and it's not working all too well, the daily driver to Passat, the Camry, whatever the case is, go out there, check out the AI engine. It could help you out, solve your problems, all that fun stuff. Otherwise, you could also schedule a little call with a telemechanic. So you've heard of telehealth? Yeah, you could get some help online. Be like, hey, what's that weird sound in the rear right? They'll help you out with that. So that's where I'm at right now. Everybody else, thanks for listening to my horrible voice. Thanks for coming on, guys. Thank you, Dan, for existing. And see y'all next time. Thank you.

You end up on raisinhood.com. I don't know what that is, but you're in the wrong spot.