Donald Long’s wildly successful radial tire races Lights Out and No Mercy bring in the best small tire racers from around world. These events have shown the progression of outlaw racing, as each year elapsed times drop, and competitors step up to quicker classes. One racer who has mimicked this progressive trend is NMRA star Valerie Clements, who won in a Jr. Dragster at Long’s first race in 2010, and is now back in her own radial tire rocket.

Clements is a hardcore racer and has been wheeling anything she can at the track since she was old enough to get behind the wheel. “I started racing Junior Dragsters in the NHRA in 2001 at eight years old. I raced in a class called 330 Outlaw for many years, and in 2011 I aged out of Junior Dragsters and stepped into a 2005 Mustang powered by a 4.6L mod motor with a YSI Vortech supercharger,” Clements says.

Since then, Clements has gotten increasingly quicker and faster, and through some hard work by she and her team, is now regularly ripping off mid-seven second passes in NMRA Renegade class trim. Now, she’s ready to return to SGMP and compete in the always tough Ultra Street class.

“I have never competed in Ultra Street and I’m very excited to run against some of the quickest guys out there with similar setups to mine. We were able to run a 4.87 to the 1/8-mile this weekend, so I believe our ProCharger-powered combination could be competitive for a few rounds. To make our car legal for the race, we will be taking our direct inlet off and trying out the ProCharger bellmouth. We will also be swapping from the Mickey Thompson Pro 275 Radial to the Gen 1 ET Street Radial,” Clements explains.

Clements and her team are planning on making some noise at No Mercy and show the world her first Duck X win was no fluke. “My team this week will consist of my dad, mom, and good friend, Franny McCarthy, who’s a part of team Dez Racing. Franny has a lot of knowledge of chassis tuning and small-block Ford blower cars in general. If we can keep the nose of my car down, I believe it has the potential of going mid to low 4.80s, which would make me very competitive.”