With parity lacking, where is Extreme 10.5 headed?

The ADRL’s Extreme 10.5 is arguably the most popular class in the fledgling outlaw series today, and certainly one of the most exciting and diverse classes in all of drag racing.  Added to the series’ national events in 2007, President Kenny Nowling’s vision was to offer a class in which the only real rules pertained to safety and aside from that, let it all hang out to see who was the baddest racer on the planet on a set of 10.5W tires, bar none.

It was an ingenious idea from the word go and the class was gaining interest, sponsor support and stronger fields.  It was healthy.  But as more competitors with financial and technical resources at their disposal have infiltrated the show, the glaring differences and performance ceilings between the combinations have become evident and the parity issue has reared its ugly head, putting the class at a crossroads between explosion and extinction.

Outlaw Pro Modified racer Rodney Rosentiel won the very first Extreme 10.5 race in 2007 with a final round defeat of Marcus Birt with a 4.37 elapsed time.  Because a lightweight, full tube chassis car on 10.5W’s was completely uncharted territory, no one really knew for certain just how quick and fast they were capable of going.  A handful of racers with backgrounds in other classes quickly joined the fray of this totally wide open class.  Mike Hill picked up a lightweight ’63 Corvette, Todd Tutterow slapped the 10.5’s on his supercharged Mustang, and Gary White brought his trick four-banger Scion over from the mostly defunct import organizations.  Throughout that first season, performance advancements were small and only minutely quicker than their big steel-bodied, 3000-plus pound brethren in Outlaw 10.5.

And then Mr. Glidden arrived on the scene…

Billy came in with the stout combination of a lightweight car, a small yet proven engine, and a wealth of experience.  Locked in a tight performance battle with Gary White throughout the latter half of 2008 and into 2009 – which saw the elapsed time standard drop more than two tenths in just a handful of races – the two paved the road for what was ahead and what these cars were capable of.

Pro Modified racing had long suffered from a lack of parity in combinations, and the IHRA tech department had spent years trying to weigh the seesaw battle between the supercharged and nitrous oxide-assisted cars.  When Nowling started the ADRL, he and everyone else knew that with the no rules format, two separate classes were absolutely necessary. The nitrous car simply couldn’t run with the screw-supercharged Hemi, and in order to maintain the health of the series, it was a no-brainer.

However, that very same thought process was not afforded to the Extreme 10.5 category.  When veterans Chuck Ulsch and Spiro Pappas entered the ring mid season 2009, the two refined their vastly different combinations rather quickly, and every hard-earned thousandth of a second that everyone else had gained to that point became an afterthought.

If one does some unscientific math, it’s clear that – given the engines and technology that are currently available – the nitrous racers in this category are fighting an uphill battle without a peak. Sheikh Khalid Al-Thani holds the current, unofficial record for a screw-blown Hemi at 3.63 seconds; a combination very much like that of Ulsch’s Camaro.  Ulsch has been as quick as 3.92, and most onlookers and keyboard crew chiefs agree that it’s perfectly capable of mid to low 3.8-second laps.  Score roughly two-tenths for the big tire over the 10.5W.  So, taking that into account, the quickest Pro Nitrous lap with the monster cubic inch engines is 3.81 seconds.  Even if bolted into the framerails of Glidden’s Mustang or Jeff Paulk’s Camaro, it can be surmised that they still couldn’t hang with Pappas’ 3.88 record.

Unfortunately this is a no-win issue without a clear-cut answer.

As previously noted, the whole idea behind Extreme 10.5 was to create a playground for the quickest cars on 10.5W tires. Pure and simple.  In that same regard, the heart of the ADRL is its true outlaw format, which Kenny Nowling and his staff pride themselves on and the racers and fans just eat up.  Thus, any sort of rules and restrictions on engines, power adders, and weight breaks being instituted to even out the playing field doesn’t stand a snowballs chance.  With the car counts as they are, splitting the class probably stands slightly lower odds.  Changing from 10.5W’s to true 10.5’s would go a long way toward evening out the combinations, while certainly making the small tire fans salivate at the mouth and create some incredible on-track excitement.  However, the power that these cars are making on that small of a tire would be downright treacherous and unsafe even on the eighth mile.

This is really a tough situation for the ADRL.  Most of the nitrous racers have parked their cars and the qualifying sheets have gotten shorter and shorter.  As the ADRL, you certainly don’t want to see a whole field of turbocharged cars and drive away current racers – including one of your biggest names – while deterring others from coming in to one of your most popular categories.  At the same time, you have to hold true to the vision you set forth or risk opening a whole new can of worms.  In the end, I think that the class will just simply have to be left to run its own course, and let the chips fall where they may.  Like all things in life, not everyone can be pleased.

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