WHEN it comes to abusing yourself and your ride, nothing beats Hot Rod Drag Week. It is the best of times and it can be the worst of times, and sometimes the difference between those two is a very fine line indeed. What makes Drag Week awesome, and keeps so many coming back year after year, are the people. They come from all over the world united in one aim – to finish.

Just completing this event is an achievement in itself and not one to be taken lightly. After all, when was the last time you took your car for a 1000-mile cruise and raced at four different tracks in five consecutive days? Unless you’ve done Drag Week, or Street Machine Drag Challenge, then we are tipping you’ve never done anything quite like it. The sheer adversity found in the challenge of keeping your pride and joy together tends to bond people. The story isn’t how fast you went; it’s what you went through to make it all the way to the end, and who helped you get there. Lifelong friendships are formed out on the road and moments created that will have listeners enthralled at bars and barbeques for years to come.

Scrolling through the thousands of images that our photographer Nathan Jacobs captured during Drag Week 2016, we couldn’t help but think about all the good times we had out on the road (forgetting those rare moments when we asked ourselves, why are we doing this again?) and then start counting how many days until the next event.

Scroll through and have a look, and we’ll be betting that you’ll be clearing a space in your schedule around mid-September next year. Unless you’ve done Drag Week you won’t understand – put it on your bucket list.