Phil Barber: NHRA drag strip's organ-shaking fury a sensation like no other

SONOMA

I was wading through a small crowd at Sonoma Raceway, heading toward the drag strip, when a Top Fuel dragster performed the first burnout of the afternoon. It was an arresting sound, even at a venue that trades in high decibels, and a ripple went through the race fans. Everyone simultaneously turned to a companion, with wide eyes and an embarrassed smile. It was the reflexive move of someone who is lost in thought at a wild animal park when suddenly a lion roars.

Athletics are a sensory pastime. We are long accustomed to the visual pageantry of the opposing uniforms, to the smell of outfield grass, to comforting sounds like the squeak of sneakers on hardwood or the clash of football pads.

But I’m telling you that nothing in sports can match the visceral power of the NHRA starting line.

I hung out there for a while Saturday, and it was a challenge to the senses.

First, a little background. The National Hot Rod Association is the world’s highest level of drag racing, and it comprises four divisions. Pro Stock cars and Pro Stock Motorcycles are powerful vehicles that take their pilots considerably faster than you and I are ever likely to travel on a road. But they burn gasoline. It is high-octane racing gasoline, to be sure, but it’s easy to see these machines as steroidal versions of your Honda Civic or Suzuki street bike.

Top Fuel dragsters (the weird-looking motorized-?crocodile ones) and Funny Cars (the bulbous ones that spread open like jaws) are on a different evolutionary chart. They burn nitromethane, commonly known as nitro, a substance also used as rocket fuel and dry-cleaning solvent. What makes nitro so potent - and so volatile, and thus so dangerous - is that it is premixed with oxygen. It burns swiftly and violently.

That’s why dragsters and Funny Cars can generate up to 10,000 horsepower. For comparison’s sake, a 2018 Ford Mustang GT, a pretty macho street machine, can hit 460 horsepower. Tony Schumacher, driving his familiar U.S. Army Top Fuel car, achieved a speed of 329.99 mph here on Saturday. Rocket fuel, indeed.

The start line is a surprisingly crowded space. This one included 10 or 12 NHRA officials, some pushing brooms or mops or walk-behind, diesel-powered fans to clear the track of debris. There were a couple of Fox TV cameramen and their cord-holders, the teams of whichever two competitors were racing at the time and a few dozen random observers - other drivers and crewmen and car owners, family members, corporate guests, etc.

The start-line ritual rarely changes. When it’s their turn to go, the two drivers fire up their engines in back of the start area, where mechanics make last-second adjustments. Two team members push each car toward the line, and the driver performs a burnout, spinning his tires at a hypnotic rate to heat them (for traction) and to incinerate any foreign objects they might have acquired on the ride from the garage.

The burnout is brief, but it serves as an introduction to the force of a nitro-burning vehicle. The car’s engine roars like thunder during this event, but that’s the least of it. A dragster or Funny Car at open throttle is a tactile event. Your ears feel it first. Even stuffed with earplugs - almost everyone near the start line wears earplugs - they feel so tickled that you want to jam a finger in them and scratch. Then the shake runs through the rest of your body. Imagine your cellphone set to vibrate, if your phone weighed like 2,000 pounds.

With all the idling and revving of these mechanical monsters, the start area is noxious. The burned nitro has a sweetly lethal smell, and it singes your eyes and nose. A fact sheet distributed by the New Jersey Department of Health notes that nitromethane is on the Special Health Hazard Substance List. The sheet says that exposure to the compound can cause nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, headache, weakness, loss of coordination, and even damage to the liver and kidneys, among other setbacks.

Some Sonoma start-line workers wore bandanas over their noses. Keep in mind that we were all surrounded by the haze of ubiquitous wildfires. None of that was enough for one female spectator, who was smoking a cigarette near the starting zone, until a race official directed her to put it out.

After the burnouts, men furiously wipe down the big back tires with gloved hands. Then the drivers slowly reverse, spotters walking in front of them to get the cars properly aligned in the chutes. There is a moment of quiet, or as close to quiet as you can get in the presence of 10,000 horses, while the drivers eye the lights of the drag-racing Christmas tree. The blue light signifies that they have found the start line. Then the lights go to amber, then green.

When the Christmas tree lands on the green, the world becomes a science fiction scene. The burnout, as it turns out, only hinted at the sonic rupture of the race. As the cars accelerate, they don’t just tickle your ears. They subtly move your internal organs and rattle your bones. I’ve never felt anything quite like it. Stand on your tiptoes for the start and it might knock you off-balance.

As the final round of Funny Car qualifying wound down, I retreated to my seat in the raceway media center. Each time another wave of cars took off, I watched my empty coffee cup move along the counter. Water jiggled in its plastic cup. I was a good 40 yards from the start line, behind glass.

Back at the point of attack, flames shoot from the sides of the cars, and you are hit with a cloud of burned fuel and rubber. And sometimes solid rubber. The first time I watched the nitro classes from the start line, I noticed later that my light shirt was pebbled with dark specks. I was wearing splattered Goodyear.

At the same time, the cars distort your visual field. Through a shimmering veil of heat and smoke, they play games with time and space. One second they are rumbling nearly at arm’s reach. The next, they are improbably distant. A good 1,000-foot run will take less than 4 seconds.

Jeff Barnes, the former Raiders linebacker, was here for qualifying on Friday night. He got to watch from the start line, and when an NHRA broadcaster interviewed him afterward, Barnes said, “The car took off and almost blew my socks off!” As I loitered near the start line during the second round of Top Fuel qualifying Saturday, one guy standing next to me commented that the engines “shake your eyeballs out of your head.”

A woman in a blue floral shirt, a middle-aged mom type, wore a look of amazement that told me this was her maiden voyage. I asked her how she would describe the experience. Just as I got the question out, the driver in the dragster next to us started his engine. It was suddenly noisy, so she leaned in close to my ear and said, “Orgasmic.”

It’s not the bodily sensation I would use to describe the NHRA start line. But hey, we all have different standards.