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CONCORD -- You'd feel the cars before you saw them. The earth would vibrate as the big V8s would unwind coming down U.S. 29, off of Eastway and Sugar Creek, spilling out of Charlotte every Saturday night for the greatest spectacle in all of motorsports.

Drag racing. On the streets of Concord.

You'd feel the cars as they neared, feel the rumble of a Mopar and the big-block power plant of an SS 396. The big Fords with the 390s under the hood and the big, fat tires on the back would be on you before you had time to react.

And then, whoosh! Like a rocket ship blowing by you, they'd be gone, racing down Tryon toward the darkness, nothing on the line but the pink sheet itself.

Before the big, modern drag strips went up across the country, like the one they'll race on here into the weekend, the races were all pre-arranged on the streets themselves. They raced up and down Stratford and Battleground and Main in the three towns of the Triad. They'd come from miles around to race in Thomasville and Randleman, driving into town with one arm hanging out the window, seat belt tightened to keep from sliding under the steering wheel, the rear end jacked up for aerodynamics and proper weight balance -- and to impress the North Carolina girls who lined the streets and chewed gum and said things like, "Squeal the tires for me, baby!"

Somewhere along the way, they started building drag strips like the one Wally Parks built in Pomona, Calif., and brought drag racing to the South. It wasn't easy, but eventually strips like the ones in Julian and Rockingham and Bristol, Tenn., were paved. And eventually, Bruton Smith got involved.

The complex they call the zMAX Dragway is a gleaming example of how the National Hot Rod Association has grown from the days when Parks ran his races in a parking lot to the modern era of 300-mph passes in front of packed grandstands. The place is magnificent, a pristine strip with four concrete lanes of smooth Carolina cement surrounded by seats that rise straight to the sky, shining new and echoing the rocket blast of nitro-powered rails deep-staged under a loaded Christmas tree.

There's nothing like the start of a drag race. The explosion of two engines side by side, each powered by a man bent on a hole shot and a bitchin' 60-foot time. The noise is sudden and awe-inspiring, shaking the ground itself, rattling the windows of the four-story zMAX starting tower and drowning out the noise of up to 60,000 fans and anything else in the surrounding countryside.

The nitro cars launch like space shuttles from the starting line at a force of almost six times the pull of gravity, traveling a quarter of a mile in less than five seconds. You're rendered deaf through the entire run, collecting your thoughts and your senses only after the chutes blow out of the back of the cars at the end of the strip.

The odor of gas and tire rubber and nitroglycerin and burned pistons hang in the air, thick and oily, toxic and insane. It's the greatest smell known to man.

John Force, the greatest Funny Car driver of all time, sat in my office one day and described a quarter-mile pass inside an 8,000-horsepower dragster.

"Imagine going so fast you can feel your skin leaving your face," he said. "You're going so fast you can outrun sound and fire. Well, maybe not fire."

Force will be here this weekend, along with all the top names in drag racing, as the new complex plays host to the start of the NHRA playoff system, a series of races in the top four divisions leading to the championship at Pomona. He'll walk in the shadow of a grandstand named for him and in the shadow of those who have gone before him, Parks and Don Garlits and Mickey Thompson and Don Prudhomme, in the state that produced Ronnie Sox and Buddy Martin.

We all came from the same service station, the Sox Sinclair on Church Street in Burlington, and we all went to the line in Plymouths, and we all wondered why drag racing never caught on in the South.

They'll race this weekend in the shadow of the big circle track that changed everything out off U.S. 29, and maybe this time drag racing will catch on. The stands will be filled with the hard-core fans of a sport so American it simply doesn't exist anywhere else, fans of the carmakers themselves, fans who once drove illegally alongside another, rolled down the window and said, "Is that your mother's car?"

Then it was on. The cars would dance in pre-arranged movements, shifting lanes in the glove-slap tradition of the duel, marking off a predetermined distance, then staging in the most American of fights. They're our ancestors here in the dirty South, men who put the ownership slip itself on the outcome, engines revving, line-locks holding the front wheels as the rears broke loose, headers screaming and 16 cylinders of firepower exploding in unison, V8s and smoke blowing past you so fast you only saw the tail lights.

We "shut 'em up and then we shut 'em down," as Bruce Springsteen sang. Then we all waited for this weekend to come, assuming that one day it would.

Contact Ed Hardin at 373-7069 or ed.hardin@news-record.com