By
Andrew Wolf August 06, 2018Founded in 2011, the Southeast Gassers Association has witnessed a virtually unparalleled level of growth in its first seven years of existence. The pride and joy of lifelong drag racer and former Pro Modified world champion Quain Stott, the organization, at its humble beginnings a mere two-car match race, gradually matured into a handful of cars and today boasts more than eighty active members, with some one-hundred prospective racers either building cars or interested in participating in the future.
Over forty period-correct Gassers made the trek to central Indiana — many of them hailing from the Carolinas and Georgia. They rewarded with a near-capacity crowd for the second year in a row, as fans lined the fence and jammed the grandstands. So lengthy was the line to get in the morning of the event that track owner Jeremy Wagler made the decision to open the spectator gates hours ahead of schedule.
Originally conducted at tracks around the Carolinas and Georgia, the Southeast Gassers have pulled up their stakes in recent years and taken the show on the road, to places like Clay City, Kentucky, and last month, to the Wagler Motorsports Park in central Indiana, where they again played to a capacity crowd who simply couldn’t get enough of the spartan nature of the 1967-era machines.“I think we may have named the series wrong,” Stott says with a laugh as he discusses the series’ geographical expansion, “but we’ve got such a strong branding with the name now that I’m afraid to change it.”
Quain Stott addresses the racers in a pre-race meeting at Wagler Motorsports Park. Mitch Stott (second from left), Quain’s brother, is also a former IHRA Pro Modified world champion. Their professional racing careers and the hustle and bustle that entails behind them, the brothers have thrown it back to simpler times — literally and figuratively.
The Southeast Gassers have an upstart sister organization in Texas, and Stott says he regularly fields calls from as far away as California. Over the last two seasons, he’s invited a pair of period-correct A/FX cars to perform an exhibition, and notes that he has visions of growing it into an official class down the road. Likewise, Super Stock has already been added to the roster, with the Wagler event marking one of its first outings. One thing you can be sure of, Stott notes, is that “anything that races at a Southeast Gassers event has to be period-correct, no questions asked.”