Brian Lohnes: How Many Seats Are There On This Bus?
A scene that I have referenced previously happened at a hotel in Michigan on a Thursday evening in 2005. This was the night preceding the last day of Drag Week. There was a good group of guys sitting around this table and the conversation was about when the hotel would run out of Corona and the future for an event like Hot Rod Drag Week.
We were clueless as to what would happen, but we did know that whatever this thing was we wanted to do more of it and we guessed others would be interested in the same thing.
I knew the stories I had been posting from decrepit hotel internet on that trip for CompetitionPlus.com were getting attention and people were following along, I knew that all my friends at home were interested in seeing what the end result was of this one way trip to Michigan with some race cars.
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We talked about how many cars you could do this with, maybe making a loop instead of the one way trip to nowhere, should prizes be offered? But the big point that we all left wondering about that night was just how many people out there were crazy enough to try such a thing. For a period of years it was a couple hundred, then a couple hundred more, and then the dam broke open.
There would not have been a single person that would have believed the seed which that event planted would germinate and grow into an entire subsection of drag racing that now boasts dozens of events worldwide. The appeal is the experience and clearly that is a universally binding factor. The most interesting thing in drag-and-drive is how many different ways you can get that experience. From the comfort of a late model hot rod to the abject depravity of being in a full tube chassis car just trying to survive the battle from stop to stop. Effectively you provide your own level of intensity.
If the last 20 years were about the growth phase of drag-and-drive, we are entering a period of relative stability. How can I be so sure? The culture has been built, the cars have been built, the large events are stable, having good leadership, and there are so many of them that there is a foundation. There’s also a ton of kids who are growing up with this in their lives, which is a great thing for the continued perpetuation of participation.
The stability phase may bring some shrinkage on the number of events and some will say when that happens that the scene is in trouble. It is not. Like everything in the world, when the gangbusters growth slows down people look around and realize that there’s a glut of options and the best ones end up sticking around.
So we come back to the question we all asked each other, how many people actually want to do this? Amazingly the answer we have today is the same one we had two decades ago. No one really knows. Back then there were about 40 people, now we’re at something like 40 events and thousands of participants across the globe.
There’s still room for everyone incredibly and while drag-and-drive looked differently five years ago and will look differently five years from now, not a single bone in my body believes that we’ll run out of room for butts in seats any year…or decade soon.
Written by Brian Lohnes.
