Visualize a tiny pressed-steel friction-motor toy car from Taiwan, the kind you roll backward to wind the spring. Release it, and without combustion of any sort, it goes like pure hell in a straight line until it hits the dog, which gets up and goes into the kitchen for a drink of water.

Now visualize the same car full-size. Big enough to get into and pull the door shut. You're at the Friday night "heads up" drags at Oregon's Portland International Raceway drag strip. On heads-up nights, you race whatever turns up in the other lane. Your car, "White Zombie," looks a bit like Taiwanese pressed steel and even makes a similar sound. To the DMV, it's a street-legal 1972 Datsun ( not Nissan) 1200 dragster, despite the fact that owner and world-record-holding auto-electroid John Wayland replaced its engine with a custom-built siamesed pair of electric motors.

Seriously.

You and the 2350-pound White Zombie inch forward in line, straight-pipe gas burners blapping all around you. Zombie makes only a faint steel-to-steel grumble, its final drive gnawing on itself. You roll out of staging toward the lights, and in the other lane is a pristine 351-cubic-inch '72 Mustang Mach 1 - stock horsepower, 275. Its burnout is a fog bank of tire smoke like a NASCAR victory celebration.

This is gonna be terrible. The Ford's a beast, and you only have two puny electric motors - and no noise.

Feeling like a drag-strip cross-dresser, you do your silent burnout anyway. The Datsun bucks and rumbles under you, emitting a respectable fog bank of its own.

You inch into the lights, the Mustang bellowing. You hear every muscle-bound power stroke of its Cleveland 351.

This is - is the word "silly"?

The Christmas tree ticks down.

You tromp on the (un)loud pedal.

Suddenly, you're looking straight down the length of your nose at the drag strip ahead, your helmet pinned back against the headrest so hard you can't pull down your chin. The rear tires yaiiiieeeee-yipe! The nose lifts. Your front wheels are stationary (you're told later), while you positively devour asphalt. The drivetrain makes violent mechanical juddering. Which gets worse. And as hard as you try, you can't lower your chin.

Far in the distance behind you: one really pissed Mach 1.

White Zombie rushes into the night faster and faster. Portland International assumes you know where the quarter-mile ends. You don't. (Even locals don't at night.) Your foot stays down until the black-night scenery gets agricultural.

You let off at last.

There are small headlights in your rearview - some slow Mustang.

You covered 60 feet in 1.658 seconds. The one-eighth mile came up in 7.713 at 86.83 mph. The quarter took 12.353 seconds at 103.55 mph — and that was slow! With a fresh battery pack and driver Tim Brehm at the wheel, Zombie has done 12.151 and 106.25 mph, the world record for street-legal electric sedans. Presiding auto-electroid Wayland (www.plasmaboyracing.com) says Zombie can beat a stock Corvette. In fact, it can, as long as the Vette isn't a Z06.

White Zombie's heart is a custom-made power unit conceived and built after years of trial and error. It's basically two eight-inch electric motors running on a common shaft that's about four feet long, built by Jim Husted. The engine sits longitudinally in the bay and is joined to a Dutchman Motorsports Ford nine-inch rear end by an aluminum driveshaft. Maximum rpm is about 7000, which, thanks to a 4.11:1 final drive, is just enough to get this direct-drive car down the quarter-mile. Energy storage is handled by no fewer than 30 12-volt Hawker lead-acid AeroBatteries, totaling 360 volts. (That doesn't mean much to most of us, but James Watt and Alessandro Volta would grin.) Maximum output, says Wayland, is 325 horsepower. No formal dyno testing has been done — these guys aren't millionaires. But one nonnegotiable figure merits our full attention — the kick-ass-right-now characteristics of electric-motor torque deliver 772 pound-feet at zero rpm.

That's what we call launch.

But wait, you thought Car And Driver thought, well, that electric-car guys are science-club nerds and recycle-your-sweat fringies. Given half a chance, we do. On the other hand, a really good lunatic fringe can be fascinating. (Conversely, a sensible, well-reasoned fringe has no place in this magazine.) And as it happens, electric drag racers inhabit a deeply spooky region at the outermost edge of fringieness. They know enough to make scary-fast drag cars, and they have the good sense to giggle and belch loudly when one of their own defeats what is contemptuously called "a gas car." It happens. Often.

That this applied lunacy should have started in Portland, Oregon, an otherwise dignified American burg, is a complete mystery. Yet inevitably, now that it has begun, secret cells are popping up in more unruly quarters such as south Florida. Portland, however, is the epicenter of NEDRA — the NHRA-recognized National Electric Drag Racing Association. NEDRA's de facto headquarters is a racer-immaculate two-car garage behind Wayland's modest southeast-Portland home. On drag-racing weekends, regional electroids mill around at Wayland's property all Friday, smirking like conspirators, while the racers are getting their electrons in line. The electro-dragster corps de ballet ranges from a decent 14-second Porsche 914, to a skinny drag bike, to NEDRA co-founder Roderick Wilde's utterly intolerable four-wheel-drive (and two ton) Grumman postal van, "Gone Postal." On this weekend, Gone Postal would have what the networks call "technical difficulties." With all wheels grinding, its 60-foot time was 1.89 at 44 mph — averaging more than 1.0 g.

Up to now, Wayland confides, the problem with electric cars has been that the wrong people owned them. Very possible. But ETs are ETs, and time slips don't lie. No matter what you — or we — think of electroids in general, two nights at Portland International made Wayland's point. Hey, these tire-smokin' Oregon greenies got juice.

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