STREET LEGAL or BRACKET RACER or BOTH?
                                                                        By George Lewellen

I have spectatored at a number of Street Legal events at Redding during 2004 and raced my car in a couple of them. I have also been a long-time bracket racer at Redding as well. I am delighted to see the turnouts at the Street Legal drags, but I am curious why more of those racers do not enter the brackets in the Street class.  Maybe it is the feeling of being non-competitive.

My daily driver is a mid-14 second car and for the most part gets thoroughly trounced in the Street Legal drags. It feels great to win a race, but losing sucks. We can all relate to that. Usually the race is pretty much decided by the first few seconds and then it is a grueling 10 or more seconds before the finish line puts me out of my misery. By the same token, however, this year I went with the Redding team to the Bakersfield ET Finals sponsored by Summit Racing. In the Street class I went 4 rounds before I eliminated myself with a careless red light. In a class that had something like 300+ entries, it felt good to make it to about the last 30 or so cars.

So, the point of this article is, if I can be competitive in Street in the brackets, anyone of the Street Legal racers can too, even if we are not competitive in heads-up Street Legal racing. What's the secret? Simple: cut a good light, like.500 to about .530 reaction time (RT), and I guarantee you will go rounds and be pretty competitive. The interesting thing is all our cars are pretty consistent. Whether slow or fast, as long as our tires don't spin, our cars run very consistently. The wild card is the driver.

So how does one cut a decent light?  The first thing is to buy a practice tree and use it a lot.  We all can react consistently to an event (a light), but not to a non-event (trying to guess when to floor it somewhere as the tree comes down). In my case, my personal RT's are from .180 to .200. This is the time it takes me to see the 3rd amber, react to it and then floor the throttle. My car is quite consistent with a .320 launch with BF Goodrich drag radials. No burn out required, air at 15 pounds and they hook.  Personal RT's of .180 to .200 when added to the .320 vehicle RT combine to produce excellent .500 to .520 lights. I also deep stage. What is that, you ask? When staging the car, first the top light comes on, next the bottom stage light comes on. Keep inching forward until the top light goes out but the bottom is still on. The advantage this gives the car and driver is there is less distance the car (front wheels) has to travel in order to get out of the beams. Your overall RT is shorter. It is simple physics.

How do you figure out your personal RT? Again the practice tree is the key. They all have the feature of setting delay and rollout. Set both of those at zero with a Pro-Tree start (with a Pro-Tree all the lights flash at once, with a Full-Tree the lights come down in sequence). Of course you will red light every time. However, you will soon see a consistent pattern of RT's. In my case .180 to .200's. Once you have a tight, predictable range in personal RT's such as mine (2/100's of a second), this usually only takes a few minutes after 2-3 sessions on the practice tree, then take your car to the track and start launching from the deep stage. Your RT's soon begin to form a pattern when you react to the tree the same each time. Simply subtract your personal RT's learned from your practice tree from your combined RT's at the strip to get the vehicle RT.  The drag strip time slip only gives you a combined personal and vehicle RT.

Now that you have your vehicle RT separated from your personal RT, you can enter the vehicle RT into your new practice tree under either "delay" or "rollout", it makes no difference which. Technically, we have determined "rollout". You are now ready for some serious practicing on the Full-Tree in the privacy of your own home. Your practice tree is now set to emulate exactly what you and your car do at the strip at the instant of reaction and launch.  If you find yourself red lighting a lot, you are probably anticipating the 3rd amber instead of waiting for it to flash before reacting to it. You can easily test this by masking the top two ambers on your practice tree. This essentially turns the Full-Tree into a Pro-Tree with .500 seconds between the 3rd amber and the green. This allows you to test whether your personal RT's are on track, in my case with .180 to .200.  When mathematically combined with the vehicle RT of .320, I should seldom red light.  When I do go red it is usually because I have anticipated the 3rd amber instead of waiting for it to flash before I release the button.  This is a very common error and it takes a lot of practice to avoid. Focus and mental discipline are everything. You will soon find yourself confident you can cut 5-0's, 5-teens and 5-20's pretty regularly.  At this point you are a formidable opponent against even the fastest car.

For most drivers reacting to the third bulb and shallow staging, reaction times are somewhere in the mid-.600's. You are prime candidates for deep staging. The only thing left to do is print "DEEP" in the top-middle of your windshield with shoe polish. This is so the starter will know not to drop the tree before you are completely staged. You are now a threat to win any Street bracket class. I was in the ET Finals, until I got careless. The fun thing about bracket racing is every car is a winner and every car is a loser. It mainly depends on how prepared you are to win. Your car will do its job, but as the driver you must do yours.

The interesting trade off to deep staging is while reaction times are quicker; overall ET's are slightly slower. Why is that? The answer is the car has less of a rolling start at the starting line. Instead of about a 12" rolling start to the starting line, the car has about a 6" rolling start. That small difference results in the car's overall ET being a tad slower. But in a bracket race, who cares? For me, it is a heck of a lot more fun to dial, say 14.50's instead of 14.40's and have a good chance at winning the round instead of cutting a .6-something light and getting thrashed. Try it, you'll like it!

See you at the starting line!

Copyright 2004