Most street performance enthusiasts and even legit drag racers are familiar with the Dragy, but for those who aren’t, the device is a simple and affordable GPS-based performance meter you can put in or on your car and measure with impressive accuracy the 0-60 mph, 1/4-mile time, 1/2-mile time, and other performance parameters. The boxes are $150 and can sync up to your phone or tablet, so it’s a cheap “toy” for someone tinkering with their car and curious about its capabilities. You can also upload your data to app-based leaderboards to see where you rank, and that adds a little competitive flare to your acceleration contests, even when solo. And no doubt it’s more competitive the closer you get to the top….and particularly at the very top.
Until recently, two-time NHRA Pro Mod national event winner — and, shameless plug, a past Horsepower Wars $10K Drag Shootout champion — Lyle Barnett held the top spot in the 1/4-mile rankings with a 5.68-second lap. There, of course, aren’t a whole lot of automobiles in the world, relatively speaking, quicker than a supercharged Pro Modified car. A Top Fuel dragster, though, is one of those few automobiles.
Clay Millican, another of the people’s champions and a gearhead through and through, placed a Dragy aboard his 11,000 horsepower Parts Plus dragster at the recent P.R.O. NHRA pre-season nitro test session at the Wild Horse Pass Motorsports Park in Phoenix, Arizona, and handily trumped Barnett’s all-time mark with his land-locked missile.
Millican clocked a 2.990 at 289.57 mph to the 1/8-mile (real elapsed time), which the Dragy registered as a 3.01 at an almost spot-on 289.53 mph. And while his 1/4-mile time of 4.73-seconds put a huge gap on everyone else in the overall rankings, it did leave the door open to a challenger. That’s because Top Fuel cars only race to the 1,000-foot mark, so Millican coasted across the GPS-located 1/4-mile “stripe” at only 229 mph, likely with the parachutes out. Top Fuel dragsters have been running 4.70s since the mid-1990s and can easily eclipse that these days — the record stands at 4.420-seconds from way back in 2004, and Funny Cars have even been 4.60s — and so no doubt someone else, at some point, will be inspired to take it away.
Like, perhaps, Barnett himself.
Said Barnett in a social media post on Monday: “Clay Millican swiped my @dragymotorsports world record from me with his TOP FUEL DRAGSTER!!! @sprtopfuel [Top Fuel driver/owner Scott Palmer] time to pour me a seat!!! I gotta get my record back!!!” to which Millican responded, “I been waiting on this text. Sorry Lyle Barnett I love ya but I had too #dragy #dragworldrecord.”
Game on?