Circularity is pleasing, isn't it? After over 800 miles, rain, hazards, breakage, sleepless nights, impromptu rebuilds, and more, the racers of Sick Week 2022 have returned to Bradenton Motorsports Park for the final stage of the event. For some, this is the night to cut loose, toss in the moonshot tune and go for broke. For others, a thousandth of a second will make the difference between a class win and second place. And then there are those who are just happy to have made it at all. Events like Sick Week are notorious for the amount of heartbreak that they can inflict upon racers...these are endurance events, after all.

Stefan Rossi's 1966 Chevy II was one of the first major casualties of Sick Week, sliding into the wall after the lower radiator hose called it quits.

Stefan Rossi's story is a great testament to what these events will do to racers. During the first round of racing at Bradenton, Rossi's 1966 Chevy II went sideways at the top end of the dragstrip after the lower radiator hose failed. Water got under the rear tires while the Chevy was pushing 180 miles an hour and and the car caught a case of concrete poisoning...not too bad, but the previously pristine Deuce was certainly worse for the wear afterwards. It would be easy to just put the car in a trailer, call it a loss and move on, but after inspecting the car, they found that the damage could be banged out with a hammer, so they continued on. That's the kind of perseverance that is required to complete one of these events.

PFI Speed's Shane Leivestad ended Sick Week 2022 on a sour note. His Honda CRX snapped the passenger-side control arm clean on the 1-2 shift and the resulting carnage from that break sent the car into the wall.

PFI Speed is another tale of perseverance. After Jamie Lankford managed to blow the engine in his Honda Civic in half after a stuck wastegate fed in over 80 PSI of boost in one shot on day one, Shane Leivestad's CRX tore the control arm apart shortly after launch on the last run. The carnage caused the CRX to steer into the wall, with Shane little more than a passenger at that point. That's a significant amount of carnage. But when Jamie's engine popped, they tried to get the car back together before timing out for the day, and Shane's CRX required plenty of attention throughout the week, including full-on parking lot rebuild at Gainesville. Nothing is easy on these events, and if it is, either the car is overbuilt or the driver is over-cautious.

These may be extreme examples of the kinds of challenges that racers face, but the fact of the matter is that drivers are more than willing to face them and those that have cannot wait to return for another chance to prove themselves. For Tom Bailey, Sick Week 2022 has proven to be a success and the caliber of machines that showed up says it all. Multiple six-second capable vehicles, a fleet of seven-second vehicles, tons of eight, nine and ten-second vehicles competed. That's fast, period. The slowest vehicle in competition, with an average of [email protected] MPH, was a 1925 Franklin Series 11a Coupe. That car, in theory, should struggle to make it 800 miles without a major servicing, period. But there it was, at the same tracks as the heavy hitters at the ripe old age of ninety-seven years. The caliber of machines was excellent, the tracks were excellent, the views were excellent and the racing was wild. We can't wait to see next year's event!