I have to say I don't believe I will ever go back for the Friday night drags at AMS, or at least it will take a lot of convincing for me to go. I got there at 630, met up with mike73 and yamahoe and was only able to make 1 pass before I left at 10:00!!! It was the most unorganized race event I've ever been to. Granted it was opening night and was told they had about twice as many people as what they normally do but they should have been expecting that and tried to have some sort of order but instead it was chaos. The way they have it set up is just like any other track at first, you come in the gate sign the waiver, pay, and then go through tech. That's where everything changes, where normal drag strips have test and tune on Fridays they have "practice" from 6:00ish to 8:00 which is kind of like a test and tune night, and later on they actually do heads up "street racing style" drags where it's run what you brung and hope you brung enough on a hand drop. They do at least put the cars and bikes into different classes. But I was expecting something more like bracket racing, I guess I should have looked into it more. But Then after 8 they have a drivers meeting while the car show cars drive around the track. After the drivers meting at 8:20 we all went over to the cars/bikes and they finally let us onto the track about 9ish. It was it was 9:45ish before they ran the first race!!! All of the cars and trucks were to run first and the bikes were last, and as long as they were taking in between races it would have probably been 11:00 or later before I could have run again, and with all the other bikes in the group they had us in I would have been beat more then likely in the 1st round. So I just said F**k it I'm not going to wait around another hour just to run 1 more time especially when I have work in the morning. There were some really nice cars and bikes there and a bunch of vehicles you would never expect to see at a drag strip. They actually had a 4wheeler class, a go cart class (not Jr dragsters actual go karts), and a dirt bike class. To me they had way to much going on there and not nearly enough staff for the night to have even attempted to run smoothly. I might try to give it another shoot in a month or so after all the beginning of the season hype dies down but I just don't know. That one bad experience will probably leave a lasting bad opinion of the Friday night drags, but it is the closest drag strip to where I live so that alone might persuade me into giving it another shot. The next closest track to me I believe is Atlanta Dragway which is about 60 miles further from me than AMS, but those extra miles gets me to a full 1/4m NHRA sanctioned very well organized strip. I guess I'll just have to wait and see how the future unfolds...
opcorn:
