SHAS­TRI BOODAN

Dubbed the mas­ter of burnout skills, Jagdeo Seecha­ran, 48, has the on­ly snow­mo­bile in the re­gion. Seecha­ran, who leads the Mad Cow rac­ing team, has mod­i­fied the mean green ma­chine and put it on the lo­cal drag-rac­ing tracks to run against high per­for­mance mo­tor­bikes. Dri­ven by Rob­by Sir­ju, fans of drag rac­ing got an op­por­tu­ni­ty to see the snow­mo­bile in ac­tion last Sun­day when Seecha­ran's Mad Cow rac­ing crew heat­ed up the quar­ter-mile track at the Cam­den airstrip in Cou­va. Seecha­ran said the snow­mo­bile has mod­i­fied wheels un­der the front skis and an ex­pen­sive dri­ve belt to the rear to push the ve­hi­cle which makes the quar­ter-mile run in just over 11 sec­onds. If run­ning on the snow the dri­ve belt can last long. How­ev­er, on the as­phalt track the dri­ve belt lasts for one quar­ter-mile run. Seecha­ran said he be­came in­ter­est­ed in cars when he start­ed at­tend­ing races at Waller­field, watch­ing the lo­cal leg­ends of the track like Frankie Boodram and Tanko Ba­boolal.

Seecha­ran is best know for burn­ing out the rear wheels of his 1975 Dat­sun 1600 on the drag race tracks. This car he has raced for the past ten years has cost him over half-a-mil­lion dol­lars in mod­i­fi­ca­tions to bring it up to stan­dard with su­per­fast Nis­san pow­er plant RB25 en­gine. How does he cre­ate so much smoke dur­ing a burnout? Seecha­ran shared the se­cret. A suc­cess­ful burnout of the rear tyre in­cor­po­rates a brak­ing sys­tem that keeps the front wheels of the car locked in po­si­tion, while the rear wheels ac­cel­er­ate on spot to gen­er­ate clouds of smoke. Seecha­ran de­scribed drag rac­ing as a dan­ger­ous sport that calls for ex­treme safe­ty and prop­er equip­ment, he said, and ad­vised young peo­ple not to take rac­ing to the streets, but to race on a track with the prop­er equip­ment and su­per­vi­sion. He said while drag rac­ers had ac­quired a tem­po­rary home at Cam­den, the time had come for the gov­ern­ment to speed up the pa­per­work to re­lease the lands for a drag-rac­ing cir­cuit at Wa­ter­loo Cara­pichaima. Forty drag-rac­ing teams will leave T&T for St Lu­cia on April 12, to par­tic­i­pate in Drag Wars:?the re­demp­tion on the Vieux Fort Airstrip. Seecha­ran says he plans to shat­ter all records on that is­land.

More In­fo

Un­like bob­sleds, which run along a fixed, un­du­lat­ing track, some­what like a roller coast­er, and are pow­ered by grav­i­ty and steered by one or two dri­vers shift­ing their weight, a snow mo­bile is pow­ered with an en­gine and is guid­ed with the use of a steer­ing. At the 1988 Win­ter Olympic Games in Cal­gary, Al­ber­ta, Cana­da, Ja­maica was the first trop­i­cal coun­try to ever en­ter a team in the bob­sled race. Their ef­forts were made pop­u­lar in the movie Cool Run­nings. A snow­mo­bile is de­signed to run freely on the snow, some­what like a mo­tor­bike on snow, the same way a jet ski op­er­ates on wa­ter.