This past weekend’s F.A.S.T. races at Englishtown, while thoroughly entertaining, almost didn’t merit a headline. We saw plenty of 10-second runs from several of the racers, but despite near-perfect weather, the best they could muster throughout Saturday’s runs and most of Sunday’s runs were timeslips in the 10.30s, a good distance from the 10.18 record. But then late in the day Sunday, after most spectators and Musclepalooza XII show participants headed home for the day, Dave Dudek, the current record holder, ripped a 10.19 in his Hemi-powered 1969 Plymouth Road Runner. Strangely enough, on Dudek’s next-to-last run of the day, the timing lights malfunctioned and the scoreboard didn’t light up, though everybody still watching could see that he was hauling. That run did put him into the F.A.S.T. finals, though, against Lane Carey and his 1971 Ford Mustang Mach 1. By the eighth-mile mark, however, we could see Dudek walking away from Carey on his way to a record-obliterating 10.056-second run at 138.31 MPH.
Not quite the nines, but that’ll come soon enough, and Dudek did take home to Michigan yet another one of Publisher Jim Menneto’s big $1,000 checks for setting the F.A.S.T. record at Musclepalooza. Dudek’s starting to run out of room in his trailer for those things.
Look for full coverage of Musclepalooza XII in an upcoming issue of Hemmings Muscle Machines.