In the time it takes to read this sentence, a car in big-league professional drag racing can reach a top speed of 330 mph as it traverses one quarter of a mile, or 1,320 feet, in less than five seconds.
That's five times faster than one drives on the freeway.
Now, in the aftermath of a crash that killed one of its competitors, drag racing believes that's too fast. And the sport's drivers are now willing to accept less speed for more safety.
"We have to slow the cars down and quit hurting and killing people. End of story," drag racer Jerry Toliver said of the sport, which was nurtured in Southern California and now appeals to millions of fans nationwide.
It's a historic change for a sport built on finding added speed to win, one that's also sparked unprecedented changes by drag racing's 57-year-old sanctioning body, the National Hot Rod Assn. in Glendora, to slow the cars down.
"We need to ratchet the speeds back some," said Graham Light, the NHRA's senior vice president of racing operations. "For the fans we still want 300-mph race cars. But do we need 330-mph race cars? I think the answer is no."
Notably, the cars -- the two classes of NHRA cars that reach those speeds are top-fuel dragsters and funny cars -- haven't been going faster for the past two years.
The funny car record of 333.66 mph was set by Jack Beckman in November 2006. The top-fuel record, set by Tony Schumacher, was 336.15 in May 2005.
The NHRA has imposed various restrictions on engine performance and body design to damp speeds. But deft crew chiefs kept tweaking their nitro methane-powered dragsters to maintain speeds that hovered near those record levels, sowing safety concerns among some teams.
Those concerns erupted last month when the funny car of veteran Scott Kalitta exploded in a fireball during a nationally televised race in Englishtown, N.J.
With its parachutes and, perhaps, Kalitta, crippled, the car didn't brake as planned and kept zooming down the quarter-mile track. It ran through the run-off area where drivers normally slow and then smashed into a pole and TV camera tower. Kalitta, 46, later was pronounced dead.
Video replays were on the Internet within hours, setting off another debate about the ethics of having such a gruesome event so widely available.
But for the NHRA and its competitors, the crash crossed a different threshold: Speeds simply had become too dangerous. "We've known these cars need to be slowed down, it's not a secret," said former funny car champion Gary Scelzi.
