After watching drag and drive on YouTube for years, I thought I might have a good baseline on what to expect when I attended my first event, Sick Week Presented by Gear Vendors Overdrive, in 2022. I was so wrong, but in the right way.

We’ve all heard the stories about competitors helping each other to get to that final day, that final pass, to FINISH. I’m lucky enough to talk about these stories, on the mic and on the web. And they happen in the super competitive world of heads-up racing too.

Just a few days ago, I attended the Lights Out 16 event at South Georgia Motorsports Park. One of the events that helped push drag radial racing into the spotlight more, I hadn’t been to it in a few years due to schedules.

But after only a few minutes after passing through the gate, I ran into Doug Cook of Motion Raceworks. Doug didn’t make it even a minute into the conversation before he told me about ‘Stevie Fast’ Jackson, and his last 24 hours that resulted in a win just by getting to the first round of competition.

After four days of cold temperatures, insane racing action and sizable crowds at South Georgia Motorsports Park, some recognizable names and repeats winners led the storylines at one of the biggest drag radial tire themed races, Lights Out 16.

After two days of qualifying, eliminations got underway on Saturday, February 22nd, and were completed on Sunday, February 23rd, 2025, by crowning winners in thirteen different classes.

As we covered on Thursday’s first qualifying session story, the Radial Versus the World class grabbed headlines when Paolo Guist reset the class record with a 3.479 pass. The other half of that pair, Ken Quartuccio, clocked a 3.49 on that run, but would return on Friday, February 21st, to drop the record further with a 3.743 run.

Quartuccio employed that performance through eliminations, using a pair of 3.4-second runs to score his third final round appearance in as many events.

Nearly two decades ago, Donald ‘Duck’ Long noticed that one of the biggest groups of heads-up racing, Outlaw Drag Radial, wasn’t being given the amount of attention he felt they deserved. So, he did something about it, and sixteen years after the ‘Lights Out’ event debuted at South Georgia Motorsports Park, it remains a destination race for racers and fans where the wild and unpredictable happens, as well as many a record are set.

Paolo Guist would be the lone car to dip into the 3.4-second range in the top tier Radial Versus The World (RVW) class during the first session, clocking a 3.498 at 213.60 MPH blast for the top qualifying spot. The impressive run was just twelve thousandths of-a-second off the world record of 3.486 at 213.83 MPH from ‘Stevie Fast’ Jackson, set last March at Alabama International Dragway. But Guist wasn’t done yet.

With the sun all but gone and track temperatures dropping quickly, the entire list of heads-up classes had completed their first session of qualifying. But the decision was made for one more round of RVW qualifying. Guist would be in the first pair of cars out of the staging lanes, lining up alongside a former Lights Out event winner, Ken Quartuccio.

The scoreboards would show history less than three and-a-half seconds later, and for more than one reason!

Although he exited before the final round was contested, the big news out of Alabama is Stevie ‘Fast’ Jackson’s record run of 3.48 at 213.82 mph, setting a new mark for the quickest radial-tire car.

Will Stevie ‘Fast’ Jackson be able to capture his second-straight Radial Versus the World win this weekend?

“I have missed radial tire racing since I left it. Radial Versus the World class has gotten soft, and we’re going to come back and whip that class back into shape.”