Minnesota native Kurt Anderson made a bit of drag racing history on Friday at a could-covered Brainerd International Raceway, when he became the first driver to pilot a full-sized rocket-powered race car down a dragstrip on American soil in some 30 years, driving the Sonic Stinger dragster to a 3.82-second eighth-mile pass at a speed of 210 mph.
Anderson and the Rocket Boys team, which includes Ky, Curt, and Buddy Michaelson, along with Ed Balinger, Kevin O’Kelly, Mike Holdridge, Dan Jordan, and Tim Keseluk, had recently come upon a hefty supply of hydrogen peroxide fuel — a resource that had rendered rocket cars all but obsolete in the United States since the 1980s — and have been working for months in preparation for track testing, with the weekend of May 29-30 penciled into their calendars.
Kurts second test run. 210 Mph in the eighth mile in 3.820 seconds.
Posted by Buddy Rocketman Michaelson on Friday, May 29, 2015
During the test on Friday, Anderson made the planned eighth-mile shutoff run you see here, going 1.05 to sixty-foot before the thrust really came in, rocketing (literally) the car to the aforementioned 3.82 to the 660-feet and a 4.91 to 1,000-feet before coasting across the quarter-mile timers to a 5.96 at just 200 mph.
These cars still hold national and international records set during the 1970s and 80s with quarter-mile runs in the three-second range at over 400 mph, and that kind of potential is certainly there with the Sonic Stinger. This test session, of course, was merely the first step in the process of bringing rocket car back to drag racing. Truth be told, the fact that the Rocket Boys come this far is history in and of itself, considering that these cars had been virtually written off for dead for decades — unseen by an entire generation of racing fans under the age of 40.