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Did you see it? It’s no typo. 4,000 horsepower. It seems like only yesterday that in order to crank out 4,000 horsepower, you needed a drum full of nitromethane and a last name like Garlits, Prudhomme, or Bernstein. Not today, kids. Two-time Drag Week champ Tom Bailey is running that gaudy number on the street. With cup holders. The Lake Orion, Michigan native’s obsession with drag racing has been simmering and growing for a quarter-century. The fire and security systems expert initially cut his teeth watching friends and relatives test their mettle and their metal week in and week out on local strips. However, it was the grueling and growing Drag Week phenomenon of the 2000s that firmly set the hook in a unique cross-country drag racing endurance-fest that has led to a series of increasingly complex, powerful, and downright wicked 1969 Camaros that got him to this point: Sick 2.0.
“My first experience with Drag Week was in 2008, when I bought a ’69 Camaro on eBay and started trying to figure out what to do,” Bailey recalled. To the uninitiated, Drag Week consists of five tracks in five days with 200+ mile drives between them. While competitors can pull a trailer with their car, they can’t use one to haul it. It is a unique if not punishing test of the limits of stamina and engineering to try and run sub 6-second cars on the track but yet still be able to cruise them for hours on the interstate.
That first ride took two years to complete, but ended up with a 1,200HP F2-ProCharged 540 ci Steve Morris Engines (SME) bullet between the frame rails. As Bailey tells it, his “Indian Burial Ground” first-gen Chevy was prone to problems and he started thinking hard about building a purpose-built car better equipped for the rigors of the event…… Read more of this article. Just click on the digital feature below this introduction.
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