Back when I was doing OverRev, I met a lot of cool folks in the sport compact racing world. Unfortunately, with that era at an end, I don’t get to see them too much any more. Imagine my surprise to run into former ProFWD driver Chris Rado and his World Racing team at a PSCA event in Fontana, California…

Chris is better known nowadays for his crazy time attack car sporting a giant front-mounted wing, that rewrote all the records for FWD Unlimted than he is for his drag car, but back in the day it was equally groundbreaking. With a Ford 9-inch straight axle up front and a v-drive bolted to the back of the transmission to make it all work, it was arguably the high-water mark of FWD drag racing innovation.

With NHRA Sport Compact and NDRA long dead and buried, the opportunities to see a seven-second, 200mph front drive car run are few and far between, so it’s good to see that the PSCA has made room in Accufab Outlaw 10.5 for them. In Fontana, Rado qualified seventh in an eight car field, only able to muster an 8.646 at 108, and hurt the motor in the process, torching the cylinder head and starting a brief oil fire.

The team swapped in a spare head overnight and got back into the game, and Rado surprised everyone by toppling
number two qualifier Greg Seth-Hunter on the strength of a huge .084-to-.420 holeshot, running a slower 7.448 @ 197.83 to Seth-Hunter’s 7.225 @ 208.33

In the semis, Rado fell to Rich Zehring, despite another .107/.211 holeshot - 7.467 @ 198.12 wouldn’t do it against Zehring’s 7.153 @ 204.48. Still, it was a good first showing for the World Racing team, and I’m told that they’ll be back again for more PSCA events in the future. With the all-time FWD record in the seven-tens, they’ve got a way to go to be truly competitive in this 6.9X class, but it’s good to see at least one of these insane engineering exercises still running in competition.