news-record.com

It's a warm, muggy Thursday evening, and the sun slips quietly below the tree line, casting the bleachers in an orange glow.

The heat radiating off the pavement makes you sweat just enough for your shirt to stick to your shoulder blades. That distracts you from the sensation of the foam rubber plugs filling your ear canals, the ones that shield your hearing but make everything sound as if you're underwater.

Leaning against the chain-link fence, you smell an odd combination: French fries - or is it a corn dog? - and burnt rubber.

It's wonderful.

It's Test and Tune night at Piedmont Dragway, a two-lane, 1/8-mile strip of rubber-blackened concrete in the middle of the rolling farmland of southeastern Guilford County.

Out on the track, drivers roar by two-by-two, testing their machines and their reaction times in head-to-head racing or against the clock.

In the relaxed Thursday-night sessions, the vehicles come in all shapes and sizes.

On this night, a modified 1954 Chevy coupe sits in the same staging lane as a stately silver 1991 Buick Century four-door sedan complete with whitewall radial tires.

Full-size diesel pickups race on the same track as classic Monte Carlos, four-cylinder Hondas and V-8 Mustangs and Camaros.

"Part of what we do is give people a place to go as an alternative to (illegal) street racing," says Seth Meredith, the track's director of promotions and advertising. "Pretty much, if it's got a motor on it, you can race it here. You'll see guys who'll talk trash before church on a Wednesday night, and the next night they'll come out here and race their dualie pickup trucks or minivans."

Along with the street-legal stuff, you'll also see plenty of lightning-fast motorcycles, drag-strip-only race cars and even junior dragsters - miniature versions of the familiar Top Fuel rails.

"That's the future of the sport right there," says Mike McCandless, the track's owner. "Those cars run on Briggs & Stratton motors, but they're built to race and they're faster than you'd think. One of those kids out there tonight is just 8 years old."

The loud little 5-horsepower motors can send the cars down the track at top speeds of about 80 mph. That's a far cry from the cars of the track's signature series: the Big Dogs.
Ultra-competitive and ultra-fast, the modified muscle cars use nitrous oxide or superchargers to go from zero to 180 mph in about 4.2 seconds.

McCandless, who bought the 51-year-old drag strip last June, has continued the Big Dog tradition. The cars run the first Thursday of every month.

"The Big Dog Shootout is our big event," McCandless says. "It's one of the longest-running, single-track, monthly series in the entire country. It's been going for 12 years now, and it draws our biggest crowds."

A typical Big Dog event will "easily draw at least 3,000 people" to the track, McCandless says.

On a Big Dog night, 25 to 30 cars will race and the top eight will vie for a $25,000 prize. It's straight head-to-head racing, and all the cars run within eight-tenths of a second of one another.

"Even the guy who's the 16th qualifier, he's still flying. It just wasn't his day," McCandless says. "To give you an idea of how close the competition is, the guy who won it in April didn't qualify in May."

McCandless enjoys the competition, and says it spurred his decision to buy the drag strip last year. It's a family business: One of his brothers, Herb McCandless Jr., is the track manager and their father, Hall of Fame drag racer Herb McCandless, is a fixture at the track.

"A lot of the changes we've made is stuff people won't see," Mike McCandless says. "We've tweaked a lot of the racing formats, and we've done everything we could to arrange for bigger purses. ... There's 19 drag strips in North Carolina, 17 of them eighth-mile tracks like us. We want to be known as the big-money track."

More changes could be on the horizon. McCandless has 110 acres to work with, and he's toying with the idea of stretching his track from an eighth- to a quarter-mile.

"But that's a big step," he says. "That's going from the minor leagues to the major leagues. We're thinking about it, but we'll have to wait and see."

Contact Jeff Mills at 373-7024 or jeff.mills@news-record.com