Straight Axles, Stick Shifts and a Double DQ: Inside the Southeast Gassers' Summer Back at The Rock and The Farm

Picture a 1960s drag strip on a Saturday night. Straight-axle Chevy IIs with their noses in the air. Willys coupes and panel trucks. Drivers banging gears in four-speeds, front wheels hanging off the ground at the hit. Now put real crowds in the stands, because this is not a museum display. It is the Southeast Gassers Association, and in the summer of 2026 it went back to two of the South's classic tracks and packed them.

Dragzine described the recipe well: period-correct machines, manual transmissions, high-winding engines, aggressive clutch dumps, wheels in the air and drivers who are not afraid to bang gears, all on an old-school dragstrip. It is about as close to time travel as drag racing gets. Two events this summer showed why that recipe keeps working.

Back to The Rock after a decade

SEGA had not raced at Rockingham Dragway in North Carolina in more than a decade when it rolled in for the Bowl4Life Foundation Rock Revival at the start of August, Dragzine reported. It arrived with homework. Rain had stopped the RAM Clutches Nationals at Knoxville Dragway in late June with eliminations unfinished, so instead of the usual Friday test-and-tune, the first SEGA cars to run at The Rock in years were racing for win lights.

The track did not make it easy. The opening A/Gas and B/Gas passes looked more like cars fighting a no-prep surface, Dragzine wrote. By the second round the racers had figured out what the strip wanted, and the result was some of the best racing of the season.

The finish of Knoxville

The makeup eliminations produced a breakthrough. In C/Gas, Tony Tatgenhorst, making only his second career SEGA final, beat defending champion Jerren Perdue for his first career win in the Ross Racing Engines powered Wasted Wages Chevy II. Ted McKee took B/Gas in the Rocky Top Missile over Charlie Lee and his Tennessee Charlie Mustang, flipping the result of their earlier final at Holiday Raceway. Ben Christopher won A/Gas in the Happy Daze Chevy II for his fourth straight final of the year, and Jerry Dean won Super Stock.

The Rock Revival itself

Then everybody reset and did it again. The Rock Revival on Saturday, Aug. 1, was a standalone event and the fifth race of SEGA's season.

Dean swept the weekend. He kept his long run of No. 1 qualifying efforts going in Super Stock, beat Tony Nowasadski and his '56 Chevy for the second time in two days, and then ran a 6.38 in the Last Rebel II Chevy II to beat Rob Walden's Strych 09 Impala in the final. Dragzine called him Dominator Dean, which is fair.

In C/Gas, multi-time champion Todd Oden's weekend fell apart with rear-end damage and then a transmission failure. Perdue took the opening, running a 6.08 in his Ghost of Fulton's Past Chevy II station wagon to beat Heath Adams and the Rusty Bullitt. Dragzine noted that Perdue had reached the final at every SEGA event of 2026.

McKee went back-to-back in B/Gas, running a 5.65 to beat 2024 champion Daniel Haynes and The Patriot Ford Falcon, and Charlie Lee's season may have ended with internal engine damage.

The Farm, four years later

At the end of August, SEGA went to Farmington Dragway in Mocksville, North Carolina, for the G-Force Racing Transmissions Nationals, the sixth race of the season and its first visit to The Farm since 2022. The crowd that packed the place, Dragzine wrote, made it clear fans had been waiting.

Christopher kept rolling in A/Gas. He qualified the Happy Daze Chevy II No. 1 with a 5.21 in a 15-car field, beat Kenneth Phillips' Corvette gasser by a hundredth in the semis with a 5.34 to a 5.35, and then beat defending champion Chase Howard 5.22 to 5.26 for his fourth win of the year.

McKee was, in Dragzine's words, nearly unstoppable. He qualified No. 1 at 5.62 and ran a 5.60 in the final against Kelvin Cannon, who had driven his Loose Cannon '33 Willys panel into his first SEGA final after years of gasser racing.

In Super Stock, Walden finally beat Dean again. Dean had won four of the first five events, and his only loss had come to Walden earlier in the year. At Farmington, Dean could not put his power down at the hit, and Walden's 6.61 beat Dean's 6.69.

A final with no winner

Then there was C/Gas, which produced the strangest result of the summer. Randy Keifer's Spine Tingler II Pontiac wagon beat Jimmy Huff's flat-black-and-gold Ford Falcon Hoopty Wagon to the stripe in the final. The win light was on. Then SEGA weighed the car, and Keifer's Pontiac came in below the minimum weight. They weighed it again. Still light. Keifer was disqualified.

That should have given Huff the win, and his Falcon made weight. But Huff had gone back to his pit before going to victory lane and completing the required post-race procedures. He later acknowledged the mistake, writing that he knew better, Dragzine reported. He was disqualified too. The C/Gas final ended with no declared winner.

It sounds like a bureaucratic mess, and in a way it is. It is also exactly why SEGA works. A class built on period-correct cars and tight rules only stays fair if the rules get enforced, even in the final, even when the crowd just watched someone win.

Why gassers still pull crowds

Gasser racing is a direct descendant of the hot rod scene of the late 1950s and 1960s, when racers jacked up the front ends of coupes and sedans to move weight to the rear tires. SEGA's classes, from A/Gas down through C/Gas and Super Stock, keep that look and that hardware, and the reports from this summer read like a lineup from 1965: Chevy IIs, a '56 Chevy, a '33 Willys panel, Falcons, a Corvette and a pair of station wagons.

What makes it more than nostalgia is the racing. A/Gas finals decided by four hundredths. A semifinal decided by one hundredth. Engines that let go, a rear end that failed mid-run, a red light that ended a champion's weekend. These are cars built to look old, but they run serious elapsed times, with the A/Gas leaders in the 5.20s and B/Gas in the 5.60s.

The points chase now belongs mostly to two drivers. Christopher has four A/Gas wins through six races. McKee's only non-winning weekend in B/Gas still ended in a final. Dean holds the Super Stock lead, with Walden the one driver who keeps proving he can beat him. And somewhere in C/Gas, two racers are still thinking about a final that both of them lost.