The man standing next to the engine had both hands clamped over his ears, and he looked like he'd done this before. That's how our reel of Pro Mod drag racing at TMP Cayuga starts: a supercharger scoop the size of a suitcase, sitting on the bonnet of a black and red Camaro, idling in the staging area while the ground hums under your feet. We'd never seen one of these in real life before. We are not the same people now.
What a Pro Mod is
Pro Mod (short for Pro Modified) is the wildest "door-slammer" class in drag racing. The cars look like road cars, with real opening doors and bodies shaped like a Camaro, a Mustang or a Corvette, but underneath they are purpose-built tube chassis with carbon bodies. The engines are huge and fed by superchargers, turbochargers or nitrous oxide, depending on the rules. In NHRA trim, the quickest Pro Mods run the quarter-mile in under six seconds at more than 250 mph. That's faster than any road car you can buy, in a car with a passenger door.
The Camaro at Toronto Motorsports Park
Our car wears a "Camaro" script on the front wing and a black and red carbon-look wrap of sharp stripes. Its blower pokes straight out of the bonnet, and four stubby exhaust pipes exit through the side of the body just behind the front wheel: no silencers, no catalysts, just open headers pointed at the tarmac. It rolls past the camera at 0:06, close enough to touch.
From behind, it stops pretending to be a road car. The rear tyres are giant drag slicks, wheelie bars stick out of the back to stop the nose going too high at launch, and two parachute packs hang off the rear for slowing down at the far end. It rolls through the water box and lights up the tyres in a burnout, the classic way to heat the rubber and clean it for grip.
The launch
At 0:12 the crew walk away, and the team in matching black shirts lines up behind the car. Then it goes. The reel turns into a blur of red and black, a cloud of tyre smoke drifts across the crowd, and an orange car flashes past in the other lane. By 0:20 the Camaro is far down the track with its front wheels in the air, past a spectator sitting on the grass bank with his camera up.
Toronto Motorsports Park sits in Cayuga, Ontario, about an hour and a half south-west of Toronto. It's Ontario's big quarter-mile drag strip and also hosts road racing, which makes it one of the busiest motorsport venues within reach of the city. We don't know the driver or the team of this car, so we'll leave them unnamed until we do.
Why it matters
Most of what we cover is Japanese: precise, light, clever. Pro Mod is the opposite in every way, and it's just as much engineering. If you like big American engines in unexpected places, read about the V8-swapped Silvia S14 from Slammedenuff, or a Canadian supercar ride in our Koenigsegg Agera RS story. And if you ever get the chance to stand at a Pro Mod launch, go. Bring ear defenders. You'll still cover your ears with your hands.
Video: One Breath Pictures.
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