By my estimate, Ned Dunphy’s 2013 Viper could probably run a 6-second quarter mile at around 200 mph while pulling a trailer. Good luck finding a Y-rated trailer tire or a venue that would allow such a stunt, but I’m confident in that assessment based on two facts: 1) Sans trailer, Dunphy’s tube-frame race car runs the quarter in as little as 6.114 seconds at 247.57 mph. 2) I watched the car make four other passes within 0.104 second and 1.85 mph of that best run at four different dragstrips over the course of a week, between which it towed a trailer loaded with tools and spare parts 660 miles.
I encountered Dunphy’s Viper and 411 other cars like it (I’m using a broad definition of “like”) at HOT ROD Drag Week, an annual event that more or less started as a way to get people to shut up about what is and isn’t a street car. It was inaugurated 21 years ago by David Freiburger, who was then the editor-in-chief of Hot Rod. Freiburger was tired of getting letters and emails from readers complaining that owners of the show-quality and/or vicious cars in his magazine couldn’t possibly drive those cars on the street. He figured nobody could point and whinge “not a street car” if it had driven some 1,000 miles in a single week, stopping at a different dragstrip every day to confuse the issue by laying down some decidedly race-car-like elapsed times. Forty drivers showed up for that first Drag Week in 2005, driving 1,500 miles between tracks. Carl Scott won in his 1967 Chevrolet Nova, averaging 8.58 seconds in the quarter mile at 157.13 mph.
In the immortal words of Ron Burgundy, “Boy, that escalated quickly.” At the end of Drag Week 2025, more than 20 cars averaged lower ETs than Scott’s Nova, with a similar number making at least one pass quicker than his average. Hot Rod has been limiting Drag Week to 400 cars for the last 10 years or so. For 2025, those spots sold out in mere minutes, and when the track opened for tech inspections the day before racing began, 89 racers who had been placed on a waitlist were lined up hoping for registered entrants to drop out. One of those on the waitlist had shipped his 8-second ’73 Corvette—and three generations of his family—from New Zealand. When he was admitted, the whole family hugged the Hot Rod staff. Sellout crowds packed some dragstrips, and thousands more tuned in to watch the livestream on YouTube with Freiburger and NHRA commentator Brian Lohnes calling each day’s action.
Anticipating the “but buts” of the couch critics, Freiburger decreed from the start that no support vehicles would be allowed at Drag Week. You drive your car from strip to strip, and anything you think you might need—slicks, jack, toolbox, spare rotating assembly, center section, transmission, whatever—had better fit in the car with you.