Some people get their thrills from skydiving or bungee jumping.

But not local drag racer Dan Benham.

Benham gets his thrills from the release of a button that sends his car to speeds of 169 miles-per-hour in an 8.9 second quarter-mile.

This is Benham's seventh year of competition in National Hot Rod Association's (NHRA) Division Six in the Super Comp division-a division in which he had a ninth-place finish in 2005, and placed second in overall points at the National Open Series.

After his top-10 finish, last season was "somewhat disappointing," Benham, who owns three Subway sandwich stores in the Highline-Federal Way area, said in a recent interview.

But the current season got off to a promising start on May 5. In the opening race at Pacific Raceway in Kent, he placed second-red-lighted in the final by two one-thousandths of a second.

"Most of our races are decided by thousandths of a second, sometimes we get down to the ten thousandths of a second," Benham noted.

The May 5 event was the first of 23 races, six of which will take place between Seattle and Bremerton. Other races will take Benham as far as Pomona, Las Vegas and Canada.

Benham got his start in a 12-second quarter-mile division, but quickly wanted more.

"I just kept saying, 'I got to go faster, I got to go faster,'" he recalled.

Racing is "a very big commitment," Benham continued.

"It requires me to work some very long days to put the pieces back together."

Still, Benham has his sights set on a higher level of competition than where he is right now.

"My ultimate goal is to run a top-alcohol dragster," he said, but one year of that is probably about a quarter million dollars."

A common misconception about drag racing, Benham said, is that it is all about getting to the finish line first.

But racing is mainly about consistency and reaction time," he said.

"When the light goes green, the racer tries to have the quickest time out of the block, and tries to come as close to the set time as possible" - which was 8.9 seconds at the May 5 race.

After seven years, Benham has a good feeling for how the race is going as it plays out.

"You get a good feeling when you're down track if you are having a good run," he said.

Earlier this month, Benham and his Subway Racing teammates, Arlyn Staiger, Randy Steinman and Dick Williams, brought their cars to Summers Chiropractic in Federal Way to show off the dragsters and sign autographs.

Seven years has done another thing for Benham," he observed. It has made speeds that would make any normal person's face white seem natural to him.

"It doesn't seem fast anymore. It feels like you are going down the freeway," he said.