The NHRA may have recently cut a quarter-mile to 1,000 feet for the fuel cars, but the trend for street cars these days is to hit the standing-mile events, seeking longer-duration kicks and higher speeds than they’d see at the dragstrip. The bummer, though, is that standing-mile competitions aren’t wheel to wheel. Recently, as you’ll read in Roddin’ at Random, an organization called Shift-S3ector made a compromise: They’d race side-by-side, but for only half a mile.
It’s an unusual but unoriginal idea. The Cal-Neva Timing Association ran half-mile drags on a 6,000-foot runway near Sacramento, California. In its Oct. ’54 coverage, HRM called the location the Davis-Winters Airstrip, though the proper name was the Winters-Davis Flight Strip. Now called the Yolo County Airport, its website (YoloCountyAirport.com) claims it was also…