Drag Racing
With its 915m long front straight, it was always intended that Adelaide International Raceway would host top level drag racing, finally giving Adelaide a national venue that could compete with (at the time) Calder Park (Melbourne), Castlereagh (Sydney), and the Keith Williams owned Surfers Paradise Raceway which, like AIR and Calder, incorporated a drag strip into the circuit design.
AIR played host to numerous national drag racing championships through the years, as well as regular off-street racing for road cars. The track then went unused and had seen no drag racing since the late 1990s, with racing making a return in November 2011. This saw Top Doorslammers run the 1/8th mile track for the first time in over 10 years and gives hope for drag racing's future in South Australia.
On 13–15 April 2012 top line drag racing made its return to AIR for the first ANDRA meeting at the track for over 10 years with he ANDRA Pro Series 1000, which marked the Australian debut (albeit for all classes, not just the nitromethane categories) of 1,000-foot (305m) drag racing. ANDRA Top Fuel will continue to compete over a quarter mile (402m) distance but short tracks such as Adelaide will only be to 1,000 feet.
Read more about this topic: Adelaide International Raceway
Famous quotes containing the words drag racing, drag and/or racing:
“Drag racing is a sport of egos, and it’s all male egos.”
—Shirley “Cha Cha” Muldowney (b. 1940)
“Keeping up with the Joneses was a full-time job with my mother and father. It was not until many years later when I lived alone that I realized how much cheaper it was to drag the Joneses down to my level.”
—Quentin Crisp (b. 1908)
“Upscale people are fixated with food simply because they are now able to eat so much of it without getting fat, and the reason they don’t get fat is that they maintain a profligate level of calorie expenditure. The very same people whose evenings begin with melted goat’s cheese ... get up at dawn to run, break for a mid-morning aerobics class, and watch the evening news while racing on a stationary bicycle.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)