The 11.50 for Fun Index: Drag Week's Unofficial Award for “Slow Cars”
11.50 for Fun Index at HRDW 2026
Hot Rod Drag Week’s goal from the beginning has been to find the Fastest Street Car in America. That ultimate goal means the “slowest class” open for racers is Street Machine Eliminator. With SME’s 10.00 Minimum ET, its entries made up half the field at the 2026 event. Out of the 353 racers on tech day, 176 were registered for the class.
This means if you are not capable of running in the very low 10s, you are most likely not going home with a trophy from the event. Actually, the slowest Class Winner was David Lipps of Street Machine Eliminator at 10.066 Average. That means the “cars with no bars” that are incapable of submitting a pass quicker than 11.50 are out of luck to win a class. Their best hope is to be the Quickest [insert Specialty Trophy] or one of the other awards like Spirit of Drag Week, etc.
At Hot Rod Drag Week 2025, Scott Franks Jr awarded the Quickest 11.50 Racer award to T.J. Hurley with his 11.536 Average. With the success of this award, Mike Moore, Joe Plocher, T.J. Hurley and Scott Franks Jr teamed up this year to bring it back, better than ever. Joe ordered Three trophies and brought them to Day Five of Drag Week to personally deliver them to the Top Three Finishers in this new challenge.
There is one rule for this award, you can’t have submitted a pass quicker than 11.50 throughout the week, just like any other index class. So, while there are racers with quicker 11.5xx averages than the winners, it was by “accident”, meaning they had a slow day that resulted in their average.
Thank you to Tara Fling for helping with this award as we have to wait until all the timeslips are turned in to process the results. In a time when the staff is at their busiest, she took the time to help me figure this out.
Congratulations to the Winners of the 11.50 for Fun Index Award at Hot Rod Drag Week 2026
#1: Thomas Van Tessel: 1991 Ford Mustang - 11.515 Avg (11.531, 11.535, 11.536, 11.515)
#2: Chuck Fryer: 1962 Volkswagen Beetle - 11.598 Avg (11.636, 11.618, 11.550, 11.58)
#3: Monte Buck: 1971 Chevrolet Chevelle - 11.628 Avg (11.537, 11.578, 11.794, 11.603)
This is an unofficial award and we hope these guys keep going with it, even expanding it to other events.
If you’d like to get involved with providing this at other events, reach out and let’s work together.
Article by Mike Narx. Photos by Eric White and Monte Buck (Chevelle)
