Neither have we…until now.
What you’re seeing in the photo above is not some sort of grudge race-style celebration where the winning racer drives back up the race track to meet his crew and the crowd at the starting line. It is, in fact, Drag Radial/True 10.5 competitor Mike Keenan staging his 1999 Chevrolet Camaro in reverse, while facing backwards, during Sunday’s first round of eliminations at the Street Car Super Nationals IX at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
As the story goes, Keenan, who’d already endured an eventful weekend that included a brush with the guardrail during qualifying, was paired up with Chris Hermon in the first round of eliminations. Hermon was unable to make the call, handing a break single to Keenan. Normally, this would be an easy gift, but Keenan, who qualified second with a stout 6.77, was also broken, as his transmission had no low gear.
So the Albuquerque, New Mexico native and his crew did what any real racers would do, and they got creative.
Knowing they simply had to stage the car and break the beams to move on, Keenan backed the car towards the beams, and with help from a pair of spotters working in tandem, staged the car in reverse with the rear tires while facing the timing tower. In doing so, he advanced to the next round and bought his crew some time to get the transmission fixed up back in the pits. Keenan did make the call for round two, but only made a coasting pass and dropped the round to Kelly Henry. But if there are points for effort and style, these guys won it all.
As per the NHRA rulebook and virtually any set of rules governing any particular race track, all cars must break the beams in a forward motion — under their own power — in order for a run to count or to advance in eliminations. In what could be summed up as a ‘grey area’ in the text, the rules don’t explicitly state that the car must be facing forward or do so in a forward gear, essentially leaving it to the discretion of the race director to allow or disallow it. Certainly, such an act would never fly at a major NHRA event, but Mel Roth and the gang at the Pacific Street Car Association certainly saw no reason not to permit it. Just one of the many reasons that outlaw-style racing is so entertaining.
