IT was a wet weekend in Melbourne just gone. Usually, that would make us sad, but with four days of Lights Out 8 racing from South Georgia Motorsports Park live streamed on dragcoverage.com.au, the Street Machine team was pretty content! Lights Out sees an absolutely stellar field of cars in action in a variety of different classes.

The big news from the event was that Steve ‘Fast’ Jackson reset the record books to become the fastest man on radial tyres over the eighth-mile, running a storming 3.737-seconds at 199.0mph. Stevie edged out Barry Mitchell in another blown Camaro for the record, who ran a 3.738-second pass at 197mph earlier in the day.

The 32-car Radial Versus The World field was truly epic, stretching from Stevie’s 3.737-second top qualifying mark through to 4.229-second bump spot, with the top 22 qualifiers all in the 3.70s. Stevie made it through the quarter finals, but spun out in the deep end after winning the race.

The eventual winner of the hotly contested Lights Out 8 Radial Versus The World comp was ‘Nova’ Joe Albrecht with his blown Hemi-powered 2006 Pontiac GTO pro mod. He faced off against Mark Woodruff’s twin-turbo Corvette that ate a valve on the day before. Woodruff’s team replaced a cylinder head and a piston just a few hours before the race but couldn’t get the fairy-tale finish with Nova Joe smashing out a 3.837 @ 202mph compared to Woodruff’s 4.005 @ 196mph. Nova Joe gets the $50,000 prize money.

Jackson is the hero of blower fans everywhere and has reset the radial record multiple times in his Fox body ’93 Mustang dubbed Shadow. That car was destroyed in a spectacular crash at the No Mercy 7 event in October 2016, also at South Georgia Motorsports Park. Check it out:

In order to be ready to race at Lights Out 8, Jackson and his racing partner Phil Shuler bought a partially-built 2016 Camaro, which was completed by RJ Race Cars in Illinois. The Shadow 2.0 is powered by a similar Roots-blown Brad Anderson Hemi combination that Jackons was running in the previous Shadow. It is a flash looking thing, check it out here:

And while Jackson has made his name on eighth-mile tracks racing radial tyre cars, he has stepped up to quarter-mile NHRA Pro Mod ranks for 2017, racing a blown 2017 Camaro alongside past champion Khalid al Balooshi in a two-car team. And if that wasn’t enough, he is also running in the Bahrain Drag Racing Championship, which runs from November through until March in Bahrain and Qatar. Busy lad!