At a point in my meandering journalistic career, I found myself behind the wheel of a Porsche 911 Turbo on a Southern California racetrack. One of the turns was a 90-degree elbow of essentially zero radius that came at the end of a long straightaway on which the sports car would reach 120 mph or so. The problem—which resembled the game of chicken in the 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause and which I was shamefully slow to master—was to use maximum braking just in time to arrive at nearly zero speed right at the corner, but not a moment sooner.
Slowing down matters as much as accelerating in most auto racing, and the same is true of STOL Drag racing. Unlike traditional Reno-style pylon racing, which involves no slowing down whatsoever, STOL Drag requires starting and stopping twice while flying less than a mile.
