On this episode of HOT ROD Unlimited
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MotorTranscript
00:00 Land Speed Racing has gone on in the East Coast for quite a few years now under a sanctioning body known as the East Coast Timing Association.
00:07 They run under rules that are very similar to what happens at Bonneville and El Mirage out in the West with the Southern California Timing Association.
00:14 But typically they have been running on old World War II runways instead of on Southern California dry lakes.
00:20 They started out in Moultrie, Georgia and then spent many years in Maxton, North Carolina, but lost their lease there last year.
00:27 And so they made a deal here with the city of Wilmington to run here for the very first time.
00:32 You may see an airport runway here, but for decades hot rodders have seen racetracks.
00:47 It's where drag racing started was on old runways and it's a really popular race on them again today, except for now we're doing top speed racing.
00:55 The format with the East Coast Timing Association and with the other standing mile events that go on these days is just that, a standing mile.
01:02 A car begins from a stop and accelerates all the way through the mile and at the end of it there's a 132 foot speed trap that clocks their mile an hour and that's how records are set.
01:12 Here at the ECTA there is no backup run, you just do a one-way pass and whatever your speed is, if it eclipses the existing record, becomes the new record.
01:24 The East Coast Timing Association is a place where the racers have the opportunity to evaluate the record book and see where their skill falls into place, be it motorcycles or cars.
01:32 There's multiple levels of opportunities within the engine classes, from flatheads, straight eights, straight sixes, V8s, and electric vehicles as well.
01:43 This is truly an amateur event with amateur racers building hot rods in their two-car garage. One car garage or carport as the case may be.
01:53 The reality is there are some people here that take it to a professional level because that's what they've been associated with.
01:59 Drag racing used to have this kind of a feel, it's very frequent here for competitors to help each other, even to beat the other person's records. Kind of like drag racing was in the 60s.
02:14 [Car racing sounds]
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03:02 Behind me here is the very first car to run over 200 miles an hour here at the Wilmington Mile. It went 2.13 this morning.
03:11 It's Bob Muracle's '59 Nash Metropolitan. It's a comp coupe, which means it's all stretched out in the nose, and it's powered by a former NASCAR racing small block.
03:20 Bob built this car entirely in his home garage, and his goal was to run over 200 miles an hour at Bonneville before he turned 65.
03:28 He got that done in 2011, before he came here to be the first to run 200 at Wilmington.
03:33 [Car racing sounds]
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03:52 This is Chris Henderson, who's been a friend of Hot Rod for a long time.
03:57 His '59 Jaguar is currently loaded with a 572 cubic inch big block Chevy, and when he was racing it at Maxton, he was trying desperately to just go 200 miles an hour, and he didn't get it done before that venue closed down.
04:11 So, he's here at Wilmington, giving it his best shot.
04:14 My main goal is to break 200. We took out the torque converter, trying to make things a little more efficient, a few modifications to the nitrous system, but just going to carry it through second and third to try to break a record over 200.
04:27 [Music]
04:40 And there it is, 204.931 miles an hour.
04:44 [Rain sounds]
04:47 We can't run for top speed in the rain, and we did lose about half a day to that here in Ohio, but these diehard racers just stuck it out.
04:56 Because unlike the dry lakes of El Mirage and Bonneville, where a lot of land speed racing goes on, there is some hope of actually drying the surface out if the rain will just stop falling out of the sky.
05:07 The rain finally stopped, and so we're trying to dry the track off.
05:11 ECTA has asked everybody to come out here in their pit vehicles and just make laps up and down the track to pull the water up out of the surface and dry it off.
05:19 Which is cool, because I'm going to have a chance to drive Wayne Jessel's stock car later. We'll see if I can get into the 200 mile an hour club here at Wilmington.
05:27 Seven or eight years ago, I got into the 200 mile an hour club at Maxton, North Carolina, driving a car owned by my friend Wayne Jessel of Jessel Valve Train Innovation.
05:36 And I'm going to try and do it again here at Wilmington.
05:39 The thing that's cool about his cars is that they're actually former NASCAR Busch Series racers.
05:44 But for land speed racing, they're modified with roller cams, dual quads, and a sheet metal tunnel ram.
05:50 We used to run a sister car to this one that David Freiberger had driven for us once before.
05:55 And we got him into the 200 mile an hour club, and he went 220 miles an hour.
06:00 And then when they decided to run this Wilmington event, we brought out this car and redid it with a little bit smaller engine.
06:07 But it's still capable of going over 200. And we're hoping to get David into the 200 mile an hour club here.
06:13 These former NASCAR racers are like the most comfortable and safe race cars that you can be in, and I just love running them up to 200.
06:20 I had two chances in Jessel's car, and unfortunately, neither one of them really got there.
06:26 These things are running a five-speed Jericho transmission that's air shifted.
06:32 And we had trouble with the air shifter on both of my runs.
06:36 The first time, there was an electrical connection, and it just wasn't making the shifts.
06:40 I kept on hitting the rev limiter, which is 9,000 RPM on these 300 cubic inch motors.
06:46 The second pass, an airline fell off one of the air solenoids, and again, I couldn't get the thing to shift right.
06:53 So I missed a few shifts and was all over the rev limiter, but I did finally get it into top gear and ran 193 miles an hour through the lights, and I got to drop the chute.
07:09 [car engine revving]
07:11 We found we had to launch the chute almost straight up into the air to get it to deploy, and it hits hard.
07:20 So at least I got that victory out of it, but we'll have to save the 200 mile an hour run for next time.
07:26 One of the things that Hot Rod has done at the opening ECTA event every year is the Hot Rod Top Speed Challenge,
07:32 where we give jackets for the fastest speeds in the two street-legal categories of racing.
07:37 This year, one of those jackets went to Mike Reichert, and this is his second time winning.
07:42 He did it a couple years ago as well at Maxton when he ran 237 miles an hour in this '94 Mitsubishi Evo II.
07:50 He actually dialed back the tune-up this year, running only 35 pounds of boost with the 80 millimeter turbo on that 2 liter motor,
07:58 and he made a pass of 215 miles an hour for the win.
08:02 [car engine revving]
08:07 Frank and Larry Waddell have won the Top Speed Challenge four times with their Mazda.
08:13 Right now it's loaded up with a 369 cubic inch Chevy Racing SB2.2 engine.
08:20 It's got a T56 and a stock 389 Mazda rear end.
08:24 At this meet, they ran 207.260 miles an hour.
08:29 [car engine revving]
08:40 That's a wrap on the very first race ever at the Ohio Mile here in Wilmington.
08:45 Unfortunately, my own performance was cut just a little bit short by a broken airline,
08:49 but you know what? I went 193, which is enough to know that that is one killer track surface,
08:54 one of the best in land speed racing.
08:56 And you know what? This thing sold out with 175 racers.
08:59 It was packed with spectators. We had awesome support from the local community.
09:03 So this deal is going to be a win.
09:05 See more at ecta-lsr.com
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