When you are christened with the nickname "Fast," you have a reputation to uphold. 

Let the record reflect, Friday morning during the completion of the Q-2 Radial vs. The World session during Lights Out 8, Stevie "Fast" Jackson provided an object lesson. 

Jackson sped to the top of the 32-car Radial vs. The World field with a 3.790, 200.08 miles per hour behind the wheel of a new Camaro-built by RJ Race Cars and sponsored by Strange Engineering. 

"You’ve got these guys that come out here and talk about hauling ass," Jackson said. "And you’ve got these guys that don’t talk about it and try to do it. I like to tell you I’m about to crush your ass, and then I like to crush your ass. That’s my MO. If I tell you I can crush your ass, you can most of the time count I’ve got four aces in my hand."

 In Thursday evening's postponed Radial vs. The World, Jackson pushed all the chips he and Phil Shuler into the pot and delivered a straight flush. If Mark Woodruff's Thursday 3.835 was incredible, Jackson's first full pass on the new Shadow 2.0 was a whole new lever kind of performance. 

Just to think five months after his horrific crash where his Mustang went airborne during the 2016 No Mercy Drag Radial event, Jackson made his first Drag Radial run on Tuesday since the incident. 

True to traditional Jackson characteristics the first run on the car was down the same left lane.  Jackson fell right back into his comfort zone after the car made a pair of successful 330 hits. 

Then the combination went awry. In a flurry of suspension changes, where the crew including Todd Tutterow, changed the location of everything but the engine plate of the car. 

"It was a wholesale deal," Jackson admitted. "The car just wasn’t working. Normally, when you get a new piece like this, it takes a month or two to get it lined out. We don’t have a month; we had four or five runs. Normally you’d want to change one thing and see what it does, and change one thing. We just changed everything at once and sort it out. That’s my MO."

Chassis builder Rick Jones clearly wasn't of the same mindset, suggesting to Jackson and team to make fewer changes at once.  

"I said, ‘We don’t have a hundred runs. Why don’t we change it all now and see if I’m as smart as I think I am?." 

"They did a good job; everybody did a good job on this thing. It’s a beast."

But never has a beast been so tame from the inside, Jackson believes.  

"We got a bunch of smart people here working on it, and for the first full run on the car, man that thing drives like a Cadillac," Jackson explained. "I mean I never touched the steering wheel. You can do the burnout, stage it and run it and never have a steering wheel. So when you get a car that does like that, it’s going to be pretty fast. It’s a bullet."

Jackson said the performance was indicative of the effort which was put into the machine just to make it to the event.  

"Everybody that helped us out with this car did a top notch job. All the components, everybody, the suspension, chassis people, Jeff at Strange, the motor people, everybody did a good job," Jackson added. "This thing right here is badass. Like I’ve never driven a car as smooth as this on radials. You know, radial cars are a different breed. Even when they run good, they’re a handful to drive; they’re moving around. I never touched the steering wheel in this thing. Fit and finish, it’s a good car. I’m happy with it. Could not be more happy with it." 

The original Shadow was one of the original cars, a back-half street car with a Pro Modified engine stuffed between the fenders. The Shadow 2.0 was Jackson's first purpose-built Drag Radial car. 

"Every other thing we’ve had has been started out as something else," Jackson said. "Even my orange car that I set the record with started out as something else. We built this as a radial tire car. So, it’s nice to see the fruit of your labor come through, especially in such a short time. 

"I loved the other car, but we got to the point where it’s just too short. It’s 100 inches long; you can’t control the wheelie in the middle of the run. You can’t apply power when you need to. It was hard to leave that thing behind, but at the end of the day, we’re here to win. I race cars for a living. So if there’s a better tool that I can use, I’m going to use it. With that said, we did a lot of stuff in this car that’s not normal. 

"Me and Phil picked how this thing was built, so like when this thing rolled out, it was either going to sink or swim. It was either going to be our fault why it was really fast or why it was really slow. So it looks like we did a good job." 

Jackson, who never admits weakness, did point out, this kind of performance came as a pleasant surprise. 

"We really expected to come here and struggle," Jackson said. "And we did. We got a lot of guys that are pretty smart working on it, and the car responds to change. The most you can ever ask from any race car is for it to do what you tell it. If you make the right decisions, you go down the race track. This thing does what I tell it, so it’s good." 

And Friday morning, Jackson told the Shadow 2.0 to go fast, and it did in a big way.