As a professional drag racer who earns his living by turning on win-lights, business is ever-essential for Stevie ‘Fast’ Jackson — even during a pandemic and nationwide lockdown. The Pro Modified and radial-tire superstar and his crew, who were prepped and ready to launch the defense of their NHRA Pro Mod championship last month, have spent much of the disruption in the racing calendar repairing their wounded Pro Mod Camaro and performing routine maintenance on “The Shadow’ — among other tasks that any team that spends the year out on the road might tackle with a little extra time at their disposal.

Oh, and he set an unofficial world record, too.

“After being quarantined for a solid month, me and [Phil] Shuler have elected to break out of prison for a little private smokey-smokey,” Jackson said of his field trip to South Carolina’s Jackson Dragway.

Off the trailer, in 2,087-feet of air, Jackson clicked off a 3.562 at 212.69 mph, to which he initially commented, “I would show you [the elapsed time] but I don’t want to make any more cars leave Radial versus The World and go to Pro 275,” before revealing the time-slip.

Later that evening, at 73-degrees and in 1,799-feet of density altitude, Jackson did himself three better, making his career-quickest run and an unofficial drag radial elapsed time time world record of 3.539-seconds at 214.31 mph, compliments of a .905 short time and a 1.152-second backsplit.

Said Jackson of his day on the loose, “Every once in a while a man has gotta’ come out of quarantine, take his little street car with street tires, and make a couple test pokes to remind everyone it is still the baddest one there is.”

The world we live in may look and be starkly different when we emerge from this pandemic, but it’s safe to say, Radial versus The World is still on notice from Stevie Jackson, and a quarantine isn’t about to change that any time soon.