No cheater slicks, no line locks, no delay boxes, no handicapping, not even a Christmas tree. Just heads-up drag racing the way it used to be, mano a mano, carro a carro, first to the finish line wins all the bragging rights. That is, if the super-rich of the Twenties and Thirties had deigned to drag race their Duesenbergs.
Five years ago, at the prompting of Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg Festival organizer John Baeke and based on an idea from A-C-D Club board member Joel Givner, the festival staged the first-ever Duesenberg drag race (officially a “gentlemen’s exhibition of speed”) at the Kendallville, Indiana, Municipal Airport. “Our membership had been declining over the past several years, so whatever we were doing, it wasn’t working,” Baeke told Jim Donnelly for a story on the drag races in the April 2011 issue of Hemmings Classic Car . “The idea (of an organized drag race) was just outrageous; I thought, ‘That’s it.’”
Indeed, almost four dozen Duesenbergs – many of them of the Model J or SJ variety and looking far more suited to a concours green than to a drag race – took part in the side-by-side racing, with some notching 15-second quarter-mile times.
And then, just as quickly as it appeared, the event went away. The A-C-D Festival still had its parade and other annual traditions, but the drag races seemed to have been a one-off spectacle until this year.
Now called the Thunder Run, the drag races will take place at the Goshen Municipal Airport, which lies a little farther from Auburn, Indiana, than Kendallville, but offers a larger 6,000-foot runway (versus Kendallville’s 4,400-foot runway) and more expansive grounds. In addition to the drags, the Thunder Run will include exhibition runs from the world’s fastest jet truck and rides in a B-17 Flying Fortress.
The Thunder Run will take place September 6 as part of the A-C-D Festival that will run through the entire weekend. For more information, visit 2015ThunderRun.com.
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