With multiple NHRA national event facilities falling by the way the wayside in the last few seasons, Top Fuel racer Clay Millican believes there are replacements available, but only if the series, drivers, and team owners, as well as race fans, are willing to think outside of the traditional box. 

Millican made the suggestion first in the CompetitionPlus.com NHRA Northwest Nationals event notebook and later in an Autoweek article.  One aspect of his suggestion is that Millican speaks from experience about the viability of eighth-mile racing while burning nitro.

It was in 2005 that Millican won the richest Top Fuel drag race at the time, the Rocket City Nationals at Huntsville Dragway in Alabama, an eighth-mile drag race that paid $101,000 to the winner.

“It does not get much better than this,” Millican said following the historic victory. “I want to thank the Werner team and our crew chiefs, Mike Kloeber and Lance Larsen, for getting the car down the track every single time. It was an awesome race weekend, and I’m so excited we won!”

All these years later, Millican still finds himself giddy over the time he ran to half-track when Nitro ran to the quarter-mile and pocketed more money than ever.

“I will always remember that weekend and my buddy George Howard, who made the investment in an eighth-mile drag race,” Millican said. “It was a really fun event, and we managed to win it and take home low elapsed time, too.”

Millican took home an additional $5000 for recording the low elapsed time, a 3.18-second run, growing his total purse to $106,000. 

With the sport changing and drag strips becoming more valuable for uses other than straight-line racing, Millican believes it’s time for the sport to consider other formats, like racing to 660 feet. His opinion for critical race fans is to suggest whether they prefer drag racing to a shorter distance or no racing at all.

“With the way land prices are going,” he said, “you can’t be mad at some of these track owners for selling. You just can’t. The numbers that are flying around, rumor-wise, that these tracks are selling for, you can’t be mad at the people that are selling them. And for me, being a bracket racer at heart, I mean, there’s some eighth-mile facilities in this country that are really good, and I don’t know why we couldn’t go to some of them.”

Millican believes some prime candidates, such as National Trail Raceway (Columbus, Ohio) and Maryland International Raceway (Budds Creek, Maryland), have the pit space and infrastructure to host an event. He even believes U.S. 131 Motorsports Park in Martin, Michigan, could be viable.

Beyond this, Millican believes Galot Motorsports Park (Dunn, NC), a purpose-built eighth-mile facility, would be a great candidate for one of these shorter events. Additionally, Millican believes South Georgia Motorsports Park outside of Valdosta, Georgia, is another.

“I once ran 333 miles per hour there in testing, running to the quarter-mile,” Millican said of his test session about a decade ago.

The big issue for some of the NHRA’s nitro tuners when talking about running multiple distances, such as a quarter-mile to 1,000 feet, is the need for multiple tune-ups. However, as he sees it when running a shorter distance, the challenge is much easier than running further.

“I grew up eighth-mile racing. And I get grief all the time on my YouTube channel: ‘I’m not watching anymore because it’s a thousand feet.’ But with some of these tracks going away, why wouldn’t we look at some of these wonderful eighth-mile facilities that are available out there?”
 
“I would be 100 percent behind doing eighth-mile races at some of these nice facilities around the country as regularly scheduled points meets.”

NHRA switched to 1,000-foot drag racing in 2008 because of safety demands from the Professional Racers Organization following the death of Funny Car racer Scott Kalitta. The recently completed NHRA Mile-High Nationals marked 15 years since the transition. There have been two eighth-mile national events; one by design and the other when there was no choice available. The 1974 IHRA Southern Nationals staged on the pit road at Charlotte Motor Speedway remains the only nationally sanctioned eighth-mile event. The other, the 2007 IHRA Texas Nationals at San Antonio Raceway, was shortened to eighth-mile because of issues with the racing surface at the traditional quarter-mile. 

Millican believes NASCAR’s business model of different distances and formats proves the idea could work for drag racing. 

"This stuff that NASCAR's doing, they're no dummies," Millican said. "They're not just randomly doing North Wilkesboro or the Chicago Street Race, for example. So why shouldn't we do something different? Why can't we do something different, I guess is the better way to say it."