Hot rodding’s roots trace back to the late 1940s, when racers took their modified cars to dry lakes in search of new top speed records. Today, that heritage lives on in the form of straight-line events held all over the country on closed airstrips. With plenty of room to stretch their legs, cars with unbelievable amounts of horsepower are pushed to their limits, and sometimes beyond, as we see in this video.
The stars of this show are a pair of C6 Corvettes, run by Kelly Bise Racing. The ‘slow’ one is a 2012 Grand Sport with a 427 boosted by twin 67mm turbos, topped with a nitrous system and pushing 1,500+ horsepower to the tires with everything lit. The quicker one is a 2009 Z06, also powered by a twin turbo 427, though they’re a bit bigger – 88’s to be precise. It is claimed to deliver a cool three thousand horsepower, which we wouldn’t dispute.
The problem, though, is delivering that power, and in this video from the WannaGOFAST Texas Half Mile, we see what happens when you are “only” pushing 2,100 to the tires with a mild tune but still lose traction at better than 190 miles an hour.
The end result is an off-track excursion with about the best ending you could hope for – the driver was able to get the ‘Vette back to the pits under its own power, with just a bit of sod in the grille as a souvenir. It could have been far, far worse, and the scariest moment in the video might just be when his wife lets him have it once the whole thing is over.
Any landing you can walk away from is a good one, right?