Drag Racing Is The Great American Motorsport: Here’s Why

Open wheel racing promotes the Indianapolis 500 as the Greatest Spectacle in Racing. As a native Hoosier, I’d tend to agree. Stock car racing contests what it has dubbed the Great American Race. As said native Hoosier, I’d personally yield that one back to the circle city. But the great American motorsport? That’s drag racing.

As Americans, we are often defined by individualism, independence, equality, achievement, and other similar values and traits. But we are also a people who prefer our things big, fast, loud, shiny, and expensive. Call that bold, or rugged, masculine or obnoxious, whatever term you choose. But nothing in racing — hell, not even the world — is quite as extreme and to excess as drag racing. Three hundred miles per hour in the distance of two football fields. The ground literally registering minor earthquakes on the Richter scale. At nearly 150 decibels, enough sound to cause immediate cranial nerve damage and be heard for miles. And with 22,000 combined horsepower, the equivalent between two cars of the first 12 1/2 rows of a NASCAR Cup Series race, or the entire current Formula 1 grid.

Organized, sanctioned drag racing was founded in 1951, officially three years after NASCAR, a year after the first Formula 1 world championship, and 40 years after the inaugural Indianapolis 500 mile race. But as the old wise tale goes, drag racing actually got its start when the second automobile was built. While that’s perhaps a bit of a stretch of the truth, it’s probably not far off. And in that sense, we like to think of drag racing as the world’s oldest motorsport. You see, an acceleration contest is distinctly American. It’s masculine and rivalrous. We’ve spent billions to see big, burly boxers knock each other around the ring. Millions of us eagerly watch NFL defenders bury running backs into the dirt. We’re unified yet fiercely independent, and whether it’s war, hot dog-easting contests, TikTok likes, or our alma mater’s athletics teams, we want to win and you to lose. Everything is a competition in America. And a drag race — me versus you, one on one, here and now — is the ultimate competition on wheels.

Find this scene at any other major motorsports event anywhere in the world … and without a single purchased pit pass. Photo courtesy NHRA/National Dragster

With tickets priced lower than virtually every other comparable level of racing in other genres, drag racing is the greatest bargain in all of…