What's New at The Drag Racing List

December 21, 1998 -- Updated MRM Game and Links...

Hi. Real quick one here. I have totally updated the Match Race Madness game databases. Now ALL the 1998 cars are in there with the best numbers of the season. Check it out! Email me to get a version. Please include "Game" in the message subject line. Also, I have updated all Draglist.com links. I am gonna reconfigure how the links are laid out soon. Any ideas? Send 'em my way! See ya! bp/drl

December 15, 1998 -- Sleep? Who needs sleep?

Hi everyone. Just a very quick one. I have updated ALL the Drag Racing Lists. We now have all of Pomona (remember -- we were missing Sunday's great finals with Pulde's 4.89, etc.) In addition, there is lots of other neat tidbits in there. This is one of the last updates where the lists will be placed online in huge chunks. Very soon we will begin breaking down the lists by individual years... See ya soon! bp/drl

December 14, 1998 -- A Story, the Card, and nothing else...

Hi everyone. Holiday rush is bearing down on Draglist.com. The latest updates are not ready yet (but are hours away). In the meantime, Danny White has uploaded a great season wrap up at the 'Corner. We also have received approval to take American Express cards at all our sales pages. With lots of business people using The Card, this should open up options for our customers. Keep our stuff in mind for last minute gifts. Ray-Ray English and Dave Doctrow won't mind running over to the house with more videos and photos! P.S. - Only THREE Jungle Jim shirts left! Happy Holidays! bp/drl

December 10, 1998 -- Where did two weeks go???

Has it really been two weeks since our last update? I can't believe how fast the time is going! I hope you are having fun with your holiday shopping. As usual, I haven't started yet (no big surprise to those of you who wait for our web updates!) Danny has sent the final day of Pomona and lots of other stuff. I have it in the computer. I have updated the local lists, I just need the three hours or so it will require to compile them and put them on the web. My goal is to do that this weekend. 

In the meantime, I tried another color scheme, updated our links section, and made a few other cosmetic changes. I even changed our promotional phrase from "Drag Racing's Complete Reference" to "Drag Racing by the Numbers!" Does it work? Who can send me a better one? Email me with ideas and let me know what you think! Got to run... Talk to you soon! bp/drl

November 26, 1998 -- HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

The Pratt and White Families send our best to all our friends around the world. We truly have a lot to be thankful for and your support is high on that list. Not doing anything too stressful today, just a little cleanup on the site and a new story at Danny's Corner. Note that I put the WHO WE ARE AND WHAT WE DO section from the home page onto its own page called Site History. I wanted to make some room on the front page. I also moved some of the larger stories from THIS page to Draglist.com Stories page. 

It also has come to our attention that we did not capture the results of eliminations at the NHRA World Finals. We lost that info in the transfer somewhere and we have to redo it. GOT to get Dale Pulde's AMAZING 4.89 in the lists, as well as Bobby Baldwin's 4.87 best and ALL the outstanding runs from that day. We hope to get that in here by the end of the weekend. If you will pardon a shameless plug: please check out our Race Place, Ray-Ray's Drag Photos, Hot Rod Tee Shirts, and The Drag Racing Bookstore pages for some GREAT Holiday gift ideas! Again, Happy Thanksgiving everyone! bp/drl

November 22, 1998 -- We are UPDATED!

Hi y'all. We are fully updated with all new information from all sanctioning bodies through the end of the year. From Shreveport to Pomona, all the great numbers are captured within. In addition, Danny White digested about 1,200 of your email updates and those all are included! We are growing by leaps and bounds both in the quantity and quality of our information. 

With all these updates entered, we now can concentrate on updating how we display the information. I intend to radically expand the display of each drag racing category. Each class will have its own webpage and each webpage will be broken down into several views. We will have eighth mile runs listed by themselves, we will break down the classes by continent, and we will break down each class by year. 

We also will bring forth the Baddest of the Bad, an all time quickest list for each class that really shows how tough each racer was! The racers' ETs and speeds will be judged against all the other performances for that year. It's hard to explain, but it will be cool. As a teaser, early estimates call Don Garlits' 5.637 at 250.69 at Ontario 1975 the best top fuel run in history. We'll see if that holds up as the programming comes together! Anyway, thanks for hanging with us during the 1998 season. We've had a blast and we are looking forward to more hard core drag thrills and spills in 1999 and beyond! bp/drl

November 20, 1998 -- Hiway.com -- is the honeymoon over?

As you know, I have been effusive in my praise of the website hosting job that Hiway Technologies has done for us this past month. But today, they let me know that I am over my 2,000MB transfer limit for November, and it's only two thirds of the way through the month! With a Top Fuel list that goes almost ONE MEGABYTE itself, it seems it will be easy for me to run out of space just by having folks check out the various lists. 

Hiway is charging me ten cents for each MB over 2,000 MB, with a projection for November of 3,150 MB. That's $115 extra! I have to keep an eye on this with possible long-term solutions of upgrading to the next service level (double the monthly rate for 3,000 MB a month) or going somewhere else, where they do not track data transfer. SHORT TERM, I made two changes that should save some transfer time. Effective immediately, fans can no longer download the Match Race Madness PC game or the zipped version of ALL Draglist.com lists from the website. 

I have added a mail link in each of these sections on the site. Simply drop me an email if you want the game or Draglist.com.ZIP file. Once a day, I will gather all the email addresses of those who want these freebies, and I will email them from my home machine. That should save lots of transfer time from the web site. Stay tuned for more info about this. Remember, fresh, updated lists by the weekend! bp/drl

November 19, 1998 -- OK, I admit it -- there's another website...

Don't worry, though, I'm not leaving you. I've been out of circulation for two weeks while I put together a web site for our intranet at work, but it's about done and I'm back! Danny White has pulled together all the stats from up through the NHRA World Finals and has sent them to me. Not enough time to get them up here tonight, but I PROMISE to post the updated Draglist by this weekend. As for tonight, I have smoothed out the pages and updated all our links. Talk soon! bp/drl

November 1, 1998 -- Crunchin' Numbers on a new Hosting Service!

Hi folks. Danny has provided me the fruits of two sleepless weekends at Shreveport and Ennis, and HOURS of inputting 1,000+ emails from our fine readers! He then took time to win his class at Paris drag strip last night, going five grueling rounds! Congrats, Danny, and thanks! I am hard at work merging this data into the main lists. My goal is to have it up here on the web this week.

I also want to thank and welcome aboard our new internet hosting service, Hiway Technologies. I felt it was high time for a change. Many of you noted how the site would be down for long periods at a time. AND you know about all my troubles  employing all the capabilities of Microsoft FrontPage 98. Well, the old place had my FTP'ing my updates to them. Hiway tells me this is a definitely NO-NO for Microsoft FrontPage because it corrupts the extensions that allow all those neat features to work. NO WONDER the search engine and mail form never worked! Anyway, on to bigger and better things.

Hiway had my entire site set up and ready to go WITHIN TWO HOURS! The only holdup was at InterNIC, when it took two days to have the www.draglist.com domain name transferred to the Hiway servers. Hiway Technologies is providing 30 megabytes of space, free WebTrends analysis, and a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee for only $24.95 a month. WOW! If you have outgrown your current web host, drop Hiway a line at www.hiway.com.  Tell 'em Bill sent ya! Note that our email address is now bilden@draglist.com as a result of changing web hosts, too.

One more thing -- just in time for the holidays, as they say -- check out the great new FLIP-A-DIAL at the Race Place! It is a super alternative to writing your E.T. Dial in shoe polish. I gotta get back to work now, so later! bp/drl

October 29, 1998 -- Read 'em and weep, folks!

Congratulations to This Week's Winners
SplitFire Performance "V" Challenge Winners!
One of you could be goin' to the NHRA Finals in Pomona, California!

Duke Osborne, Honesdale, PA
James Robins, Arvada, CO
Jayson Wolgamott, Medford, OR
Brett Roberts, Silver Spring, MD
Bill Pratt, Waldorf, MD

EACH OF YOU HAVE WON A FREE SET OF SPLITFIRE SPARK PLUGS AND A LIMITED EDITION JIM YATES RACING Tee Shirt !!

You have just a few chances left to enter the SplitFire Performance "V" Challenge. (Check out the link on our home page). I made it just under the line as weekly winner #109 for 1998! Here's hoping for Pomona! Congrats to all my fellow winners, including Ray-Ray English, who won way back at the Fram Nationals, winner #29. I'm on the phone to Danny, who is about to send a HUGE update! See ya! bp/drl

October 26, 1998 -- A little more fuel, a little less clutch...

Hi. Just checking in quickly. Danny reports he is EXHAUSTED after attending both the IHRA and NHRA record-fests at Shreveport and Ennis. We will get these times and all the 1,000 email updates into the lists in the next week. I also radically expanded our Links section. "Drag Racing and Automotive" got too big, so I split it in two. Start sending me your ideas for Links categories because I am going to have to break these down further in the near future. Thanks to Phil Burgess and "E-Ticket" and Michael Ray's "Heads Up Review" for promoting our new Search Engine! The folks from Pinpoint tell me they have improved it. We now get almost no "false positives" when searching the lists -- just the good stuff! Gotta run -- talk soon! bp/drl

October 18, 1998 -- More fine tuning...

Hi everyone. Just another quickie. Danny called today and said Shreveport got rained out, but not before dozens of great runs. He will try to return next Saturday for the completion of the event. Danny will have the same problem as all the other racers, sport professionals, and fans currently in the Louisiana/Texas area -- how to do both Shreveport and Ennis! I was glad to hear that Danny got to meet and hang out with Bret Kepner, Ed O'Reilly, Ron Colson, Geoff Stunkard, and others to take his rightful place in the traveling "drag freak circus!"

As for me, I announced the Fun Ford Day event at MIR yesterday with Ken Stout. Good stuff from there. The 5.0 "Super 'Stangs" were cool, hitting low eights with either turbos, nitrous, or blowers. I will get these guys into the list post haste. Quick door car pioneer (WAY before Top Sportsman and Pro Mod) Wayne Torkelson was there with Wayne junior in the driver's seat. The '55 bucked like another Ford product -- a BRONCO -- with severe tire shake in round one. The run shook the car apart so hard, they could not return for the second round. Wayne, Jr., came back later for a 7.03, 201 mph baseline pass. I hope they did better today. I'll let you know.

Harry Raynor was Wayne's opponent yesterday in the blown Ford Pro Mod match. He had a decidedly different day, slamming the '66 Cobra GTH to a career best 6.477 at 213.16! Harry said Scotty "you-know-who" had supplied the tune up, and there was more left -- he decided not to activate the high speed lean out since it was the motor's first pass! A later 6.87, 200 mph single showed there is still some work to do to develop consistency in the new combination. The 'Stang was running more blower overdrive than IHRA allows, but it was legal in all other respects. The '47 puts Harry third on the outlaw Ford list behind Johnny Rocca's Houston 6.37 and Glen May's 6.43.

Note that I gave up on another Microsoft FrontPage feature on our Home Page. Tired of not getting my hit counter to work for weeks, I called on the fine folks from Link Exchange to insert one of their reliable FastCounters. It works great so far. Try it for your site. I also broke the Danny's Corner and Drag Racing Bookstore pages down into many separate pages as they were getting too big and slow to load. Check out the new format!

P.S. - It's 1:40am on 10/19. I just added a GUESTBOOK to the site! Check it out! It's been a long time coming. Just like the hit counter, I went out and FOUND a ready made solution instead of trying to kill myself. Please drop me a line in the guestbook. Who (besides me) will be the first up in there? More soon! bp/drl

October 14, 1998 -- SEARCHING for a new Draglist.com!

Hi everyone! In this installment I am alternately using and ignoring Microsoft FrontPage 98. I used it to create all the new buttons you see at the top left and bottom of each page. These will allow us to more easily move around Draglist.com because the buttons appear in the same place on each page. I ignored FrontPage 98 by basically giving up on trying to create my own search engine. I might get that together sometime in the future, but for now, the folks at PINPOINT systems have offered a super search engine for our use. Search on a driver's name, a car name, an engine type, a chassis type, or whatever! Click on the new SEARCH button and try it! We also added new pages for STORIES and for the many AWARDS Draglist.com has received. We've listed a few of our awards on the front page in the past, but we've received several that have never seen the light of day. As a result of my clearing out and sorting my 2,000 emails the other day, I found all our awards. So, long story short, I've placed them on a page. The stories page will contain race reports, features, and even unique emails I receive. For starters, I am going to upload all the great match races I have witnessed at Maryland International Raceway over the past ten years. And speaking of those 2,000 emails I finally sorted out, you'll be happy to know that they included over 1,000 separate emails with Draglist Updates. Danny ALMOST has these all entered in. As soon as he does, we will get them up here. Have I told you lately how much we depend on Danny White? It's a LOT! By the way, Danny just sent me a new story from the Texas Quick 8 Association. I will update Danny's Corner with that tonight also. Now go play with the search engine! Finally, in addition to forwarding my "Bill's NASCAR Adventure" story to the online press, I sent it to the Henrico County Police. Captain Lewis Shaw responded almost immediately. Regrettably, my schedule has prevented me from publishing that response until now. Check it out below. bp/drl