It is no secret that DJ and Ryan McCain are successful in their racing exploits. Lately, the team has been assaulting the track in a pair of cars at the more significant radial tire events. “Black Plague,” the team’s Limited Drag Radial nitrous-injected Mustang, has been turning heads in much the same fashion as its “Bowser” X275 Datsun has over the years.

With younger brother Ryan McCain concentrating on the tuning of both cars for No Mercy 12 and DJ taking his wheelman skills and applying them to each, they headed to the race with high hopes.

“We came out for Q3 of qualifying with plans to make a clean hit. It hiked the front end up a bit, which it had done earlier in the week, but I was able to make a good run. When I whomped it, it went up, and I might have stayed in it a little too long. I whomped it again, it went up again, the wind got under there, and the next thing I know, I’m flying down the track,” said DJ. “I reached up and pulled the chute. I came down, tried to save it, and hit the wall. The other driver, Luke Smith, did a great job to stay off me. After that, she ended up on the rollback, went back to the pits, and everyone thought it was over. It was all doom and gloom.”

Fans of radial racing know that seeing a flying car at South Georgia Motor Sports Park is not a new — or even uncommon — occurrence, but what is unusual is how the McCain Racing team overcame so many obstacles to not only fix the car but fix it before the next round of competition.

Where most teams would have pulled the plug on the weekend and just concentrated on the other car, the McCain boys hustled back to the pits with Black Plague and immediately began dissecting the damage to determine the next steps to fix the car back up.

“I thought about it, looked at the car, and we thought we could fix it. From then, it was all hands on deck — we ripped the whole car apart. We had a broken anti-roll bar, a broken wishbone, driveshaft, needed a front strut, brake rotor, and wheel. It also broke the headers and steering rack. We fixed all of this in a matter of a few hours as we were trying to get ready for the Magic 8,” says McCain.

“We managed to get it fixed with about three minutes to spare; we dropped it on the ground, and Mark Menscer did a front-end alignment really quick.”

As Magic 8’s first round was held during the fourth round of qualifying for the No Mercy event, they didn’t have much time to repair the car. It was a mad thrash, with the whole team — and many other especially helpful guests — lending a hand to sort out the issues. They were under the car banging on this and wrenching on that while DJ was running around the pits securing parts from three wheels procured from the Devil Horse crew to a front brake rotor from Manny Buginga and a wishbone from UPR to cannibalize for parts along with a long list of other items the team needed. Chassis builder Mathew Mungall came over to weld the rack up, and even Scott Tidwell and Paul Gargus — who ended up being his LDR final-round opponent — supplied brake mounting bolts to get him back into the game.

Unfortunately, when he rolled into the first round of Magic 8, the car wanted to do the same thing, so he checked its attitude and brought the car back to the pits to save it from further damage.

Now, one might think that just repairing the car well enough to make another hit would be a win in itself — and it was. But the McCain boys were just getting started in LDR competition at No Mercy 12.

By qualifying with a strong 3.962 at 180.77 mph before he took flight, McCain had earned himself the top qualifier spot in LDR against some seriously stiff competition, as 40 cars were vying for the Duck’s pile of cash at the end of the rainbow.

Talented and well-known racers all fell to the McCain juggernaut at No Mercy. In the quarterfinals, McCain set the LDR record with a monstrous 3.917 blast. Then in the semifinals against Andy Manson, he was part of the quickest side-by-side LDR pairing ever as his 3.927 eclipsed Manson’s 3.928 by just a thousandth of a second. And in the final round against Magic 8 winner Paul Gargus, he cracked off another record-setting pass, dropping his own number down to a 3.915 to put a hard-earned stamp on the weekend.

Oh, and don’t forget — during this insanity, DJ also captured the Magic 8 runner-up in X275, driving Bowser.

Want to talk about talent and drive? This team has the market cornered.

And yet, there was one finally high-point in the weekend.

“The RPM Act is so critical for our future, and I realized that this weekend when everyone came together, even guys I’m competing against like Justin Martin," said DJ. "He offered me anything I needed in his trailer. This whole deal shows how the drag community sticks together, and I appreciate that. Everyone who offered me a helping hand or parts, whether I took them or not, I’d like to thank everyone who played a part in me getting it back together,” he says.