Have you ever wondered how someone with barely an ounce of knowledge of drag racing would try to explain drag racing to another person? Allow us to introduce Rachel, who goes only by her first name — and we’d hope not even a real first name, if she’s wise. Rachel’s YouTube page documents her explorations of abandoned private properties, and because filming yourself trespassing and sharing it with the world would be evidence to a crime, Rachel kept her name on the down-low and wore a facemask before facemasks were hip, to conceal her identity.

A year after its closing in 2015, Rachel snuck into the New Bern Motorsports Park in New Bern, North Carolina, an 1/8-mile dragstrip some half a century old, located near the coast on the Neuse River. Despite having been closed for only a year (or less) at the time, nature was already beginning to reclaim the raceway. However, unlike tracks slated for redevelopment or other use that are dismantled piece by piece, New Bern’s gates were closed with the facility fully intact, providing a sort of apocalyptic view of a racetrack that was seemingly populated one minute and not the next.

While Rachel’s tour and description of the drag racing process is likely informative enough to the average person, her explanation of a burnout, her miscue in calling the 1/8-mile a 1/4-mile, the air quotes on “gassers,” and her curiosity of whether the “W” on the scoreboard indicates a win — among other things — is a few minutes of comedy gold to those of us in-the-know.

Fortunately, this abandoned drag strip story has a happy ending — in 2019, the property was sold, cleaned up, reopened under a new name, Showtime Dragstrip (not to be confused with the track of the very same name in Clearwater, Fla.), and remains operational to this day. No word, though, if “Rachel” came back for a proper course on drag racing.