Ride Along With Jeg Coughlin In His Elite Motorsports Pro Stock Camaro

With sixty-two career wins in Pro Stock, Jeg Coughlin Jr ranks fourth all-time in the class for race wins and second among active drivers behind Greg Anderson. He also has 5 NHRA World Championships in the class, and recently won his 1,000th round of competition at the recent Magic Dry Organic Absorbent Arizona Nationals at Wild Horse Pass Raceway Park in Phoenix, Arizona, further bolstering his claim as one of the classes elite wheelmen.

Pro Stock is and always has been my favorite class in drag racing because, more so than any other class, the driver is directly responsible for the performance of the car. While Top Fuel pilots can certainly cause their cars to slow down, but once they’re strapped in, the car can only go as fast as the tune dictates. In Pro Stock, the driver not only has to dump the clutch when the tree drops as opposed to stabbing the gas, but they also have to nail four shifts perfectly as their car covers the 1,320.

Shift too early and you pull the engine out of its peak powerband. Shift too late and hit the rev limiter and the engine stops pulling. Races are literally decided by thousandths of a second and a matter inches, so missing a shift by even a couple hundred RPM, either way, can cost a driver a race.

On top of that, reaction times in Pro Stock are usually much better than nitro classes, with drivers often launching within a hundredth of a second of perfect light, while nitro drivers find their comfort zone more around the 5-7 hundredths range. Like shifting, a few thousandths difference in reaction time often wins and loses races for these drivers.

Check out this video for a glimpse of what goes on inside the car while Coughlin is driving, paying special attention to the rhythmic shifting as the naturally aspirated engine screams toward its redline. If that’s not music to your ears, you’re not a real geared!