Dave Hance characterizes Old Bridge Raceway Park, as a track that is a blue blood, dyed-in-wool quarter-mile facility. That’s why the veteran promoter of the ultra successful Shakedown at E’town figured that his efforts are best served by spoon-feeding his doorslammer-hungry customers a sampling of racing 660-foot in one, anything goes category.

“The fans will get to see professional doorslammer car racing to the eighth-mile and won’t know what to expect,” said Hance, also a participant in this weekend’s event. “We are happy to introduce eighth-mile to this crowd and we’re curious to see how they are going to respond to it.”

Dave Hance characterizes Old Bridge Raceway Park, as a track that is a blue blood, dyed-in-wool quarter-mile facility. That’s why the veteran promoter of the ultra successful Shakedown at E’town figured that his efforts are best served by spoon-feeding his doorslammer-hungry customers a sampling of racing 660-foot in one, anything goes category.

“The fans will get to see professional doorslammer car racing to the eighth-mile and won’t know what to expect,” said Hance, also a participant in this weekend’s event. “We are happy to introduce eighth-mile to this crowd and we’re curious to see how they are going to respond to it.”

Last season’s event produced the quickest and fastest elapsed time ever laid down by a doorslammer, when Scott Cannon Jr. drove his outlaw-prepared Mopar to an unheard-of 5.738 elapsed time eclipsing the previous legal-combination of 5.891.

Cannon’s car made the historic run with the assistance of a screw-type supercharger, a combination limited to a 6.00 quarter-mile safety regulation in a doorslammer. Because of this, Hance created the Outlaw Eight-Mile Challenge. Only NHRA and IHRA legal superchargers will be permitted in the Lend-America Pro Mod Blown division.

“At some point as a rule maker, we may have to consider going eighth-mile racing,” said Hance. “I’m not anti-quarter mile. I am just thinking of the future.

Hance believes that last year’s string of 5.70s by the second-generation Cannon, who was tuned by his six-time champion father, Scotty Cannon, was just scratching the surface of what some of this breed of cars could turn.

“The perception was that these teams could run 5.60 and possibly 5.50s,” Hance explained. “If the right people got after it, we could have had 5.50s.

“To do that in a door car, and if something happened, we’d have a problem. Someone could get killed. We really don’t want that. I know you can get killed running 7.0s but you have to draw the line somewhere. I’m not even sure it’s the right spot now. I believe in taking the screw blowers out of the quarter-mile and having them run the eighth, is a step in the right direction.”

Hance confirmed that he met some initial resistance in remodeling the Outlaw portion into a shortened race course, but believes his decision was the right one to make in terms of the future well-being for his event.

“There was one team that was planning to come to reset the quarter-mile record but backed out when we told them screw blowers could only run eighth-mile,” Hance said. “There wasn’t a big backlash but once we posed the question of how do we keep these cars out of the 5.60s, do we really want the NHRA down here enforcing every rule down to the letter? The NHRA has a rule that a screw blower can’t run outside of a 6.00 unless it’s in a Funny Car. We have to police ourselves as racers or we will end up killing ourselves.”

Hance is watching the viability of the eighth-mile competition and though 2010 will likely remain quarter-mile, 2011 might be a different story.

“I can’t say right now,” Hance said. “We’ll look at the racing and the data. Maybe 2010 might be too early but in the future we are going to have to look at shortening up the race course. It won’t be 1,000 feet because that just doesn’t have a ring to it. For me, it’s quarter or eighth mile.”

For the moment, Hance found himself in the middle of a tug of war between tradition and a shorter race course. There were some who wanted eighth-mile only. The fight to keep the tradition, sources say, turned bitter behind the scenes.

“We had some lobbying for the eighth mile and it got pretty tough,” said Hance, who declined to name the lobbyists. “I just didn’t feel that ramming eighth-mile racing down their [fans, racers] throats was the best way to go. I just figured it was better to start spoon feeding and then work it in. We compromised to have an eighth-mile class.”

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