The Drag City “Snake Draw 32” 🐍 Floating The Idea of a New Way to Score Racing

For years now, the way I’ve scored my races at Drag City has been brutally simple: line them up, run them head-to-head, and let the clock decide who lives and who goes back in the case. Single elimination. No appeals. No committee meetings. It’s clean, it’s dramatic, and it has given us some of the finest moments in this little corner of 1980s inland Southern California that exists mostly on plywood and imagination.

But time has a way of whispering in your ear.

After watching the same handful of front-runners pile up heat after heat — and realizing that my fastest cars are also the ones absorbing the most wear — I started to wonder if there might be a better way. Not softer. Not easier. Just smarter. A format that spreads the action around, gives every car a real shot at proving itself, and still builds toward a proper, blood-in-the-water final.

Enter something I’m tentatively calling SNAKE DRAW 32.

The idea is simple in spirit, even if it looks a little more elaborate on paper. Instead of throwing thirty-two cars into a straight ladder and letting the early rounds chew them up, the field is divided into eight balanced heats of four cars each. Every car runs three times. Points are awarded. The strongest rise. The rest go home knowing they actually got to race, not just blink and disappear.

I’m not saying this is the new law of the land at Drag City. Not yet. But for the Spring ’87 Muscle Car tournament, I’m seriously considering giving the Snake Draw a chance to prove itself.

How it works (for 32 cars)

• Split 32 into 8 groups of 4.
• Each group runs a round-robin (3 races per car).
• Points per matchup:
  • Win = 2, Loss = 0
  • Tie-breaker = total time across the 3 races
• Advance:
  • Top 1 from each group → 8-car playoff (3 more races for finalists)
  • Or top 2 → 16-car playoff (4 more races for finalists)

Wear math:

• Non-advancers: 3 races
• Winner: 6–7 races depending on playoff size

Tracking effort: still easy, because groups of 4 are tiny and you can paste them as blocks.

THE STEPS, IN ORDER….

1) Assign the 32 cars into 8 groups of 4 (balanced “snake seeding”)

Assume cars are ranked 1 (fastest) to 32 (slowest).
Use this grouping (it keeps each group balanced: one fast, one upper-mid, one lower-mid, one slow):
Group A: 1, 16, 17, 32
Group B: 2, 15, 18, 31
Group C: 3, 14, 19, 30
Group D: 4, 13, 20, 29
Group E: 5, 12, 21, 28
Group F: 6, 11, 22, 27
Group G: 7, 10, 23, 26
Group H: 8, 9, 24, 25

Inside each group, label the cars:
A1, A2, A3, A4 (same for B, C…H)

Example for Group A:
A1 = seed 1
A2 = seed 16
A3 = seed 17
A4 = seed 32

2) The 6-race schedule for EACH group (round-robin)
Run these six matchups in this exact order for every group:
Group B is the same pattern, etc.

Result: each car runs 3 races, against the other three cars once.

3) Lane assignment that’s fair and automatic (no extra races)

To avoid one car always getting the “good lane,” just do this:
In each matchup, the first car listed starts in Lane 1.
The second car listed starts in Lane 2.
Because of the schedule, each car ends up in Lane 1 about as often as Lane 2 over the 3 races.

4) Scoring (simple)

For each head-to-head:
Win = 2 points
Loss = 0 points
(Optional) DNF = 0 points and record the time as blank
Rank within the group by:
Total points
Total time across the 3 races (lower is better)
Fastest single run (if you need a final tie-break)

Advance either:
Top 1 from each group → 8-car playoff
or
Top 2 from each group → 16-car playoff

5) “Master Run List” (keeps it fun and spreads wear/heat)
Total = 48 races to complete the group stage (8 groups × 6 races).

If Snake Draw 32 works the way I think it might, it won’t replace the old way out of sentimentality or novelty — it’ll earn its place the same way any car earns a reputation at Drag City: by surviving the laps. This isn’t about softening the edges or manufacturing parity. It’s about balance. About giving every machine three honest shots under the lights before the knives come out in the playoffs. If the format proves fair, exciting, and worthy of the name, it stays. If not, we go back to the ladder and nobody speaks of this again. That’s racing.