On Sunday afternoon in the shadow of the San Gabriel Mountains in southern California, Erica Enders-Stevens made drag racing history when she became the first female to ever win an NHRA Pro Stock world championship, also etching her name alongside Shirley Muldowney and Angelle Sampey as the only female professional champions in NHRA history. But it wasn’t just that she did it, but how she did it, surviving four rounds of epic drag racing on the final day of the season that will be talked about for decades to come.

Before Enders-Stevens was able to punch her ticket into the already-legendary, winner-take-all final round with Jason Line that ultimately sealed her championship fate, she first had to dispose of Jonathan Gray, who has quickly become an absolute gunslinger on the starting line. Any thought that Gray was going to take it easy on the points leader was wiped away at the flash of the green, when both he and Enders-Stevens chopped the tree right at the roots, with both recording recording perfect triple-zero reaction times.

Enders-Stevens won the match by a 6.49 to 6.52 count, but few were watching the finish line numbers as they picked their jaws off the floor at the sight of matching perfect lights. Even Mike Dunn and Dave Rieff in the announcing booth were floored at what they had just witnessed.

On Monday, the NHRA’s esteemed “stat guy”, Lewis Bloom, answered the question that virtually everyone had the instant they saw those six zeros on their television screens: “wow, has that ever happened before?” And the answer, according to Bloom, is no. As he reports, it’s the first time it has occurred in eliminations in an NHRA professional category in history.

To put those odds into some perspective, just since the year 2000, there have been more than 16,000 pairs of professional class cars/motorcycles go down the race track during eliminations at a national event. You’d of course have to account for the fewer number of national events prior to the 90’s, the 1970 debut of Pro Stock, and even the existence of Pro Stock Truck to calculate the exact number of total races in NHRA history, but even if you extrapolate the number out generously, you’re still talking a metric ton of drag races. Tens of thousands. All without a double perfect light.

The odds are probably still better than winning the Powerball or being struck by lightning, but as you can see, double triple-oh’s don’t happen all that often. And by ‘that often’, we mean once every sixty-plus years.