The War in the Woods no-prep at Indiana’s quaint Brown County Dragway is widely regarded as one of the nation’s most treacherous drag races, combining a short, narrow racetrack right out of the 1950’s with a surface about as slick as a dance floor. It takes some industrial strength sackery, as our good friend broadcaster/announcer Brian Lohnes would put it, to race there, and it is most certainly not the place for primo-condition automobiles to chance their existence. Yet, there in the midst of it all this past September, at the seventh edition of War in the Woods, was this beautiful all-original 1969 Chevrolet Camaro SS fit for a magazine cover or a show-and-shine award.
“What is this guy doing here?” was our initial reaction. We probably weren’t the only ones to think that to themselves. But Eric Trigalet wasn’t phased.
Trigalet brought his real-deal muscle machine over from his home Danville, Illinois home, not so much as batting an eye at the famously-sketchy Brown County racetrack front of him. In fact, he double-entered the car — after his race on big tires, he’d hot-foot it back to his trailer, where he and his crew wild swap wheels and tires and remove the wheelie bars, download the data, refill the nitrous bottle, and install the 28×10.5’s needed to run in small-tire, and hustle back to the lanes to make his pairing. The effort all paid off, as he marched through the Big Tire field and won the whole shebang, marking the highlight of his season and his to this point brief no-prep racing career.
“I started racing BMX when I was 8, and later on I started racing motocross. Growing up racing dirt bikes, I always felt like I was in control, and I avoided a lot of injuries. So then I get into a car with a cage a fire suit and helmet and everything else, it gives me confidence that I’m in control, and so it doesn’t bother me to go out there and race a nice car. I hate rusty-looking junk that looks slapped together, and other guys can be confident I’m not going to run into them, because I don’t want to. I do care, but I also do push it.”
“After getting married and starting a family, I started doing competitive four-wheel drive land navigation with my Jeep,” Trigalet adds of his story, and his path into drag racing. “As my kids got older, we migrated back to motocross as a family in 2006. I bought a ’72 Chevelle in 2017 and fixed it up, but it was too nice to make a race car out of it. I bought a ’99 GMC…
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