E
very February, Drag
Illustrated turns its
attention to the
town of Cecil,
Georgia. Cross
the tracks as you’re coming
into town (population: 280) on
Old Coffee Road, head north
on US 41 and within a few
minutes South Georgia Motorsports Park will enter your
line of sight. Built in 2002 and
opened in 2003, South Georgia Motorsports Park, the gem
of Cook County, has played
host to innumerable drag races
over the course of the last 13
years, but few have generated
the kind of year-round buzz
that Donald “Duck” Long’s
events have since the inaugural
running of his DuckX Production’s The Night the Lights
Went Out in Georgia event in
2010. In the years since, Long’s
two annual visits to the area
have become races of legend,
regularly bringing in hundreds
of racers and tens of thousands
of hardcore fans. It’s of little
surprise Long’s tradition of
successful events continued in
February; though few would
have predicted the scale the
event would take on in 2016.
An official count was never
provided, but the seventh-annual running of Lights Out
brought Southern Georgia to
its knees. A crowd estimated
somewhere around 25,000
had traffic backed up for miles
in both directions, shutting
down freeway off-ramps and
essentially disabling cell phone
towers in the area on the
Saturday of the race. Matter of
fact, midway through the day
Long and his cohorts began
turning paying spectators away
at the gates trying to get in to
see roughly 450 race teams do
battle. Drag Illustrated was
there for every minute of the
six-day radial racing marathon,
and here goes the good, the
bad, the unbelievable and the
interesting from Lights Out 7:
Testing’s Over.
Photograph by G R S M o t o r s p o r t s
DragIllustrated.com
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