Cut a good light, make just about your fastest run ever, and still get smoked in the first round … that’s what competing at drag racing’s highest level can be like, as Cory Reed is learning on a weekly basis. He was off like a shot and still got sent home by the legend Jeg Coughlin the last way any driver would ever want: on a holeshot.
It’s just what happens when you face one of the truly great drivers in the history of sport. Reed cut a serviceable .035 light, nailed his shifts, and still barelylost in the first round of the Texas Fall Nationals. “I left pretty good – I knew it when I let the clutch out – but when I peeked over around half-track, there he was,” he said of the many-time world champion, who’s won NHRA national events in a record-tying seven different categories.
Mired in the back half of the field, as he’s been since the first two races of his burgeoning Pro Stock career this summer, Reed made a run quick enough to beat Coughlin, who not only survived the round but went on to win the event, keeping alive his remote championship hopes. “I didn’t just see him, I saw him the all way through high gear,” Reed said. “Somewhere around the eighth-mile mark, I thought, ‘Get out of here, Jeg,’ but he never did.”
The Texas Motorplex scoreboards showed a 6.58 at just over 208 mph in Coughlin’s lane and a quicker 6.57 at more than 210 mph – the second-fastest speed of Reed’s young Pro Stock career – in the right. The margin of victory was an agonizingly close eight-thousandths of a second, which, at more than 200 mph, is less than two feet.
Reed’s run was the third-quickest of the round, better than championship contenders Dallas Glenn (6.582), Erica Enders (6.579), and a dozen other drivers and bettered only by the other two contenders for the 2024 title, Aaron Stanfield (6.559) and Greg Anderson (6.543). “I told Jeg at the top end he was one of my all-time heroes,” Reed said. “He told me, ‘You’re doing good, stay at it. You’ll get there.’ “