Yahoo Autos High Plains Dragster: Wyoming's Street Racing Capital
Joey Anton rolls his 1992 Mustang notchback into the burnout box. A pair of goggle-eyed starting lights floats unblinking above the car’s massive cowl induction hood. With a blast of V-8 engine sound, Anton lights up the Mustang’s slicks in a puddle of water. Spectators cheer. It’s just a matter of time.
This story originally appeared in Volume 19 of Road & Track.
Car trailers line Westwinds Road; it’s a straight shot to the starting line, where Trent Diaz’s Nova cuts a sinister figure. A fierce tangle of forced-induction plumbing juts from its engine compartment, and the low-slung, coal-black racing car skulks into the lane next to Anton’s. Diaz preps the Nova’s slicks with more hellacious sound, smoke, and cheers from the crowd. Then, he pulls up beside the Mustang on a bumper line laid down by a slash of orange spray paint.
This is the Bar Nunn Cash Days, a street-racing event held on a public roadway in Bar Nunn, a tiny suburb of Casper, Wyoming. It’s a legal version of No Prep, a raw form of drag racing force-multiplied by the hit cable television show Street Outlaws. Referring to the unprepared track surface on which most street racing occurs, No Prep was born from surreptitious meetups on remote highways. It’s since grown into a nationwide drag-racing movement. This event is but one example.
Nowadays, a number of No Prep events are staged legally, held on airfields and drag strips around the U.S., providing a national circuit of sorts in which the best No Prep racers can compete without losing their cars to Johnny Law. The central principle of No Prep racing is that participants must adapt to any surface, varying—just as public streets do—from flat and grippy to cracked and gritty. Bar Nunn Cash Days is one of the few No Prep racing events that is both legal and held on public streets.
Westwinds Road, the Bar Nunn racing grounds, is a 10-minute drive from a good steakhouse and a chain hotel. It’s not exactly the middle of nowhere but not quite the middle of somewhere either—just two lanes of concrete pavement running pin straight through the grasslands. Carbon-black burnout marks streak the road at one end; at the other, there’s a cul-de-sac. Overhead, it’s just an American West dome of cobalt sky. At the starting line, Anton and Diaz sit in their highly prepped street-legal racing cars while, one-eighth of a mile down the road, local photographer Kyle Cleary trains his Nikon on the finish line. With cash at stake, photographic evidence is crucial, so Cleary sets the camera to shoot eight frames per second as the cars roar by.
Race organizer Balor Zigmont watches nearby and explains the rules. Simply put, it’s a tournament-style shootout for street-legal cars, with a cash pot awarded at the end. There’s a $100 buy-in for small-tire cars like Anton’s and Diaz’s, meaning their racing slicks can only be up to 28.5 inches tall and 10.5 inches wide, a standard size for No Prep racing. It’s $50 for cars on street tires. There’s a guaranteed $2000 payout. Setting a maximum size for racing slicks limits the cars’ traction, a kind of equalizer in this run-what-you-brung-style race that spotlights skill over unbridled horsepower.
According to No Prep canon, the Cash Days format was introduced by Texas street racer Chris “Limpy” Collins, a bearded mountain of a man for whom racers hold deep reverence as the movement’s godfather. The tournament, as in just about any sport in the world, involves a series of contests between competitors vying for an overall prize. In this case, it’s not badminton matches; it’s drag races. Anyone who’s competed in a Cash Days event, or watched one of the numerous videos on YouTube with Cash Days in the title, knows the drill: mainly performed after dark, illuminated by headlamps, and with spotters watching for the five-0.
“It’s chip-draw style,” Zigmont says. “If we’ve got 20 racers, we’ll have 40 chips, half of them red, half of them blue.” These are poker chips, and according to lore, the standard procedure going back to Limpy’s original rules is that they’re drawn out of a Crown Royal whisky pouch.
“Everybody draws a chip,” he says. “Whoever’s numbers match race each other, red chip in the right lane, blue chip in the left lane. Horsepower doesn’t matter. You can have whatever car you want.” Then the cars race, untimed; the winner moves on, and the loser is out.
Organized mainly through private chats and social-media posts, No Prep racing has attracted a younger generation of fans and racers with its desperado vibes, camaraderie, and purity of winner-take-all competition. Like the illegal events, legal No Prep racing happens on any available unprepared surface—frequently on the backside of a drag strip, from the shutdown area toward the starting line, for example. Such races are primarily “heads up,” meaning both cars leave the starting line simultaneously, defying the sophisticated handicapping schemes used in bracket racing to even up competition in events sanctioned by the National Hot Rod Association (NHRA).
At the Bar Nunn starting line, things are happening quickly. Ryen DeClue, his straw hat bearing up against the brutal prairie rays, gives each driver the five-second signal—a come-here motion like a hype man bidding them to applaud louder. The engines jump to launch revs, filling the big sky with deep V-8 rage and turbine whistle. DeClue thumbs a button on the starting fob and ducks. The bulbs light, and the cars charge out of the gate. The nose of the Mustang leaps as the slicks hook up, and the cars tear away, blasting down Westwinds Road toward an infinite horizon.
If you’re an angler, you know Casper for blue-ribbon trout—there are around 4000 catchable browns per mile, according to the Wyoming Office of Tourism, feeding in the riffles of the North Platte River. To a visitor from out East, Casper also appears to punch above its weight in drag racing. According to research by Insurify, an insurance comparison-shopping site, there is often a negative correlation between a state’s street-racing rate and its population density. Wyoming, the second-least densely populated state in the U.S. after Alaska, with around six people per square mile, has 42.4 drivers per 100,000 with a street-racing violation, coming in second (after North Dakota) on the company’s list. Idaho, meanwhile, with 8.3 such drivers per 100,000, is 10th.
