The NHRA people are extremely friendly when it comes to pit access. For five bucks, you get almost the same access as the news crews do and with a zoom camera, you have the same access as them. Nothing is private and all the teams know who is doing what and who is running which setup.
Here's a shot down the pit row

You can see in the picture that it's not very crowded here. I took a lot of these pictures on Friday when the event was about 1/2 sold out. On Sunday, I'm almost positive that they exceed the limit on spectators. However, since it wasn't very busy on Friday, I got some good pictures without having to fight with everyone else to get a good picture.
 

Kenny Berstein's pit

This was as close as it gets for the spectators. As far as I'm concerned, this is close enough, especially when they start the cars, keep reading and you'll see why. The Del Worsham/Jim Head pit was a little more accessible, but either way, this is a lot close than you'll ever get to any IndyCar or NASCAR pit for five bucks.

Whit Bazemore's pit

This was the typical pit setup. All the team transports would line up like they would in a parking lot. Then each transport pulls their canopy out and sets up their work area under the canopy. Since there were so many teams at the race, space was an issue. As a result of that, the Funny Car teams set their bodies out in the walkway so anyone could walk up to it and look aty it, sit under it, polish it, put stickers on it(not reccomended!) or get real closeup pictures. It's a cool feeling when you see a Funny Car on TV(if you follow NHRA in TV), then you see it sitting in your way at your local NHRA event. That's why I like the NHRA evets so much.

 
Mad Magazine Funny Car

Here are two people standing about three inches away from the Funny Car body looking at all the stickers on it. All the stickers on the Funny and Top Fuel cars are placed on the fresh paint and then a layer of clear coat is sprayed on over the stickers to help reduce drag. I think I'm going to have the stickers on my Prelude cleared over too.. :)

 
Del Worsham's car
 

This is what a Funny Car looks like when it's all assembled with the body opened. This is Del's car sitting in the staging lanes about ten minutes before he ran on the track in qualifying.

 
Kenny Bernstein's Top Fuel car sticking through the crowd.

This was pit row on Sunday. Since all the race cars are towed to the staging lanes, it was a total pain in the butt to tow the cars through the crowd. You can see the Bud King trying to fight it's way through the endless crowd of people so it could run.

 
The Winston experience

The Winston Experience was setup by Team Winston so the fans could "experience" NHRA racing first hand. Basically, there were a bunch of cool rides and videos going on in several booths. This was taken in Friday, the line of people stringing out of here on Sunday was about a mile long, so it must have been quite an experience. Or maybe it was the Winston girls????

 
Overview shot of the pits

This shot was taken from the grandstands on Friday. You can see all the bigger team's transports lined up next to each other in the very back up on the hill. The remaining vendor booths, amateur pits, and the Pro-Stock pits were spreadout on the Firebird roadcourse.

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