Season Preview

Photos by Tom McCarthy

Motorcycle drag racers, no matter what the bike, will have a place to race in 2016.

This will be an interesting year for the sport of motorcycle drag racing. The MANCUP sanction, formerly known as “The Manufacturers’ Cup,” has expanded to five races this season, up one from last year. They had their first ever event at Rockingham in 2015, and now they are teaming up for two events there this season. Add the season opener at SGMP and the World Finals at SGMP, toss in a dash of weekend racing at Memphis Motorsports park and there it is, the 2016 MANCUP season in a nutshell. Hopefully this will be a good year for MANCUP as they took their lumps in 2015.

The season opener last year was a rain out, save for a partial day of qualifying. At their second race of a four-race season, day one, a testing day, was a wash out at Memphis. The next two days were OK, but the surrounding bad weather, adjacent to the track, had racers and spectators in doubt. So race attendance was down from what it could and should have been.

Race three of the four-race season was at Rockingham and, while the weather was great, the attendance was mediocre due to it being a first-time MANCUP sanction race at this facility. Motorcycle drag racing is strong at The Rock, but one has to consider their October race with the AMRA is really the continuation of 20 years of "All Harley" drag racing now run under the AMRA banner. Two decades of traditional MC drag racing awaits racers and fans of the Fall race, so they know what to expect. Once the MANCUP and the Rockingham race facility add staying power to their combination, year by year, the attendance numbers will grow.