AMERICAN BEAUTY
AS THE sun began to set over Bradenton Motorsports Park in Florida, the golden light caught Jarrod Wood’s Radial vs The World Corvette. To me, it looked like performance as sculpture, an artwork of speed. If drag racing has a reputation for vehicles that move as fast as they look, this Corvette looked ready to enter hyperspace.
Jarrod was first drawn into drag racing when he decided to compete in Street Machine Drag Challenge 2016, and it didn’t take long for the Victorian to make an impression. He built an HQ One Tonner specifically for the event, and by week’s end he’d run Drag Challenge’s quickest-ever pass up to that time (see sidebar, page 63). The bug had well and truly bitten. “I’d had cars, but never drag cars,” Jarrod says, “and after running Drag Challenge I just wanted to go faster.”
The burgeoning radial racing scene then drew Jarrod’s attention. The growth of this wild genre of drag racing has been hard to miss over the
