Happy Halloween from DRAG CITY: The “Muscle Car Monster’s Ball” Concludes!

The crowd was huge on all Hallow’s, drawn by the promise of good food, good music, and the best high-horsepower ground-pounding in the state! And the drivers delivered…in spades! There were, once again, a lot unexpected upsets in this, the final round of the Muscle Car Monster’s Ball held on Halloween: a couple of rookies wowed the crowd by beating expectations and went farther up the chain than anyone anticipated! Fans of “Team ’67 Heaven” were disappointed, Chevy and GM fans were bummed too, but for the MoPar fanatics it was all thumbs up as The Final Battle came down to a race between two awesome monster Dodges!

Heat one started with a bang as rookie Mack “Moby” Mahler faced off against recent tourney trophy winner Oscar “Outlaw” Obermann, and his ’70 Boss 302 “White Noize” was the victor against “The Landlord,” Obermann’s flaming red ’70 Chevelle SS454, a stunning upset against an accomplished veteran right out of the gate! Mahler was gunning for “Storm Rider” Sutherland’s white ’67 Malibu SS “White Lightning” and seemed like he would get his chance, but in Elimination Round 2 Sutherland was shut down by “Wild Thing” Wahlberg’s ’64 Hemi-powered Dodge Polara, sending him back to the paddock while Mahler advanced to the Final Elimination round, giving him the bragging rights he was seeking before being shut down himself by Bart Bernardi’s ’70 Dodge Challenger T/A. The Final Elimination round was a Ford vs Dodge affair, but both Mahler and William “Werewolf” Ward’s insanely fast ’65 Mustang “Golden Dawn” lost their respective races, leaving The Final Battle between “Breakout” Bernardi’s Challenger “Striker” and veteran Wahlberg’s “The Final Countdown,” Mopar vs Mopar with everything on the line! When the smoke cleared it was the “Anniversary Gold” Hemi-powered ’64 Dodge at the front of the winner’s circle yet again, cementing his already formidable rep as one of the winningest drivers in Drag City history! No matter how much racing abuse that ’64 Polara takes, it seems that nothing can shake her down, and long after many of her contemporaries have blown up and required rebuilds, “The Final Countdown” keeps taking flags and trophies!

Even with the Round 2 loss, “Storm Rider” and “White Lightning” still turned in the fastest race time of the entire event, with an almost equally amazing showing in Heat 1 by Todd “T-Bone” Taggart’s orange GTO “Skull Crusher”, and former tournament winner Bram “Blackjack” Brody’s white ’67 Camaro “Ghost Rider” won his share of races as well, so Team ’67 Heaven still had some bragging rights, but sadly Jeremy “Lucky” Logan did not live up to his nickname this time around, with his mist blue ’67 Nova SS “The Slider” showing signs of fatigue and possible pending engine failure in its middling numbers; this is another tournament winning veteran car that will have to go into the shop for some major attention before its ready for the track again.

With the victories and the losses there was plenty of fun all around, as the track’s ’67 Ford Tractor and hay trailer did hay ride duty around the track between heats, taking young and old alike on an up-close and personal tour of the course, and after all the photography and congratulations at the end, both the inspection area and the staging area-usually restricted to staff and participants only-were opened up for all to see, so the fans got to talk to their favorite drivers and check out all the cars up close. It was an awesome end to a spooky rubber-burning spectacular that broke attendance records and gave everyone a chance to have a good time…which, win or lose, is what classic American muscle cars are all about!