Video Review: Hot Damn Doorslammin' by Drag Racing Underground

By Bill Pratt

This past weekend I watched Drag Racing Underground's latest video, Hot Damn Doorslammin'. The video features doorslammers from bracket bombers to Pro Mods, but spends most of its time with the Englishtown-based Quick 8 circuit. Hot Damn Doorslammin' provides a good insight into the E-town Quick 8 deal and its competitors. These guys are hard core heads up racers and Hot Damn Doorslammin' gives 'em a chance to talk about what makes them and their machines tick. 

Drag Racing Underground is a big part of this scene, as evidenced by the respect the racers give to the Drag Racing Underground Forum, where they log in to psyche each other out, build up the races, and talk up the rivalries. 

Doc Laura looked hot as ever and gave the racers lots of time to talk about whatever they wanted to. She asked each racer a standard set of questions. The racers usually repeated her statement, then took off and provided some interesting stuff. This format worked well, but I always found myself wanting to hear the remainder of the conversation that followed each "official" interview. The stuff that faded away often times seemed more interesting than the standard questions and responses. Maybe Jon will let the Doc loosen up and just have more conversations on the next tape... 

A tribute to the late Quick 8 Doorslammer racer Richie Wyman was great. Quite frankly, I had missed the news of his passing. The Drag Racing Underground crew did him proud with a good retrospective of his career and his impact on heads up doorslammer racing in the Northeast. The quality of the racing footage was outstanding throughout and while I didn't time it, the tape seemed to last forever -- a great value for the bucks. 

Hot Damn Doorslammin' features several cameo appearances by stars of drag racing, the WWF, and other racing personalities. These 30 second spots are interspersed liberally throughout the video and pull the production together into a neat package.

The studio voiceovers were, well, about as surreal as one would expect from Drag Racing Underground. Only Doc Laura and Jon could pull off drag racing voiceovers as slow and genteel as a BBC gardening program and make it work. This tape leaves you wondering whether it's just weird or tongue in cheek, but you are afraid to ask because not knowing probably means you're not hip enough... 

Anyway, the tape took me back to the first Drag Racing Underground video I saw, From England to Englishtown. Back in the '80s, that tape had all the sport's hard-core insiders saying, "Have you SEEN this thing?" Hot Damn Doorslammin' retains that tradition of bizarre, but heartfelt coverage of a cool and underreported section of our sport. Dig door cars? You'll dig Hot Damn Doorslammin'. Drag Racing Underground is on the web at, you guessed it, http://www.dragracingunderground.com/.

Bill Pratt
raglist@msn.com