Inside Drag Challenge: 1000HP, 1000KM And No Air Con

Australia’s most gruelling drag and drive event, Street Machine’s Drag Challenge, recently wrapped up, and saw a field of nearly 200 entrants snake their way to five different drag strips in five days throughout South Australia and Victoria, completing an arduous 1,000+km road trip on top of racing every single day.

Among the field of the nation’s toughest street cars was a slew of entries from Victorian horsepower connoisseurs, MPW Performance. This year, instead of campaigning any of his famous 7sec blue Commodores or his mind-bending big block Capri, MPW proprietor Adam Rogash was riding shotgun and seeing the event from a different perspective.

“We had six customer cars entered this year - a mix of body styles, tyre sizes and power outputs,” begins Adam, who spent the week assisting customers achieve Drag Challenge glory. The MPW team finished the event with two podium finishes.

We probed Adam as to the hardest part of the event, and with the wisdom of someone who’s campaigned front-running cars at previous events - as well as supported customers running 9 and 10sec passes - he had the following to say.

“The event is wildly different depending on where you’re running. If you’re running in a smaller class that’s not as competitive, your week is going to be easy compared to someone campaigning a faster car in a more competitive class. In my experience, anything quicker than 8.50s and you’ve got your work cut out for you.”

The universal constant at Drag Challenge is the fatigue - big days of racing, followed by extremely tolling road legs between tracks. It’s not uncommon for entrants to be fixing vehicles on the side of the road well into the night, or arriving at the next venue at dawn, red-eyed and white-knuckled after dodging Australian fauna on country backroads.

“The lack of sleep takes its toll. It’s almost certain that you’ll end up tired. Even if everything goes well, you’re in noisy cars doing the street miles and you don’t get a chance to rest - that’s the same whether you’re a passenger or a driver,” Adam adds.

Speaking of passengers, any spare seat in an entrant’s vehicle is a prized commodity, as entrants must pile all their tools and supplies for the week (including their pit crew) into the vehicle. “You can’t have a dead seat in the car,” says Adam matter-of-factly, which begs the question why serial pest Chris Cutajar keeps getting the call up.

“People like Chris are invaluable at Drag Challenge,” he laughs. “They’re doers, and that’s who you need in the car. They’ll roll up their sleeves and do everything from changing oil or tyres, to checking pressures, to getting lunch and drinks so that the drivers can focus on the task at hand. We’ve got a whole team of people like that, and it contributes to our success.”

And while the notion of suffering through an event like Drag Challenge with 200 other entrants and their crew might breed a kinship of shared trauma, Adam explains that the social aspect of the event is one of its main draw cards. 

“Basically every other entrant is there to support one another, there’s a great camaraderie. We get to catch up with people that we might only see once a year at the event, and we really look forward to that. Supporting fellow racers is the real backbone of Drag Challenge.”

We close by asking if suffering through the road legs in 1,000hp street cars with no air conditioning is the hardest part of the event, and without thinking Adam quips “That’s fuck all. Sitting in Kirkey seats or bending yourself around a roll cage in the back of a Fox Body Mustang, that’s the hardest part! It’s an amazing week though, and I wouldn’t change a thing,”