Bob Brodovsky’s life is devoted to high-speed pursuits.

In his day job as a traffic officer with the Placer County Sheriff’s Department, the 47-year-old Penryn resident occasionally finds himself zooming down freeways and backroads in his patrol car, dodging other motorists while chasing bad guys.

Brodovsky spends his off time traveling to drag racing tracks around the West, launching his 1971 Plymouth Barracuda like a rocket down a paved quarter-mile strip in less than 10 seconds. That’s what he’ll be doing this weekend at the 28th Annual Funny Car Fever at Sacramento Raceway Park.

“It’s much scarier when you’re driving fast in heavy traffic,” Brodovsky said. “Driving a dragster is a lot of fun — your car can go from zero to 60 in 1.2 seconds. That’s how fast your car launches.”

Of course, drag racing, like police work, has its share of dangerous moments.

“Things happen,” Brodovsky said Wednesday while driving his patrol car. “I’ve almost hit the wall before. I’ve been real lucky, knock on whatever wood-grain finish we’ve got in this car.”

Brodovsky races in a class called Pro Gas, which is subdivided into categories based on how fast drivers’ cars are capable of going and what limits drivers can push their cars to consistently without blowing out their engines. Brodovsky drives in the “C” category, which has a minimum qualifying time — or index — of 9.60 seconds.

“I can actually run an 8-second quarter mile in (my car),” Brodovsky said. “I can reach 8.90 at 150, 160 miles per hour.”

It would seem, then, that Brodovsky could actually race in the faster “B” category, which has an 8.60 index. However, driving that fast consistently would greatly accelerate the wear and tear on his car, driving up the costs of his hobby significantly.

Sometimes, in fact, Brodovsky finds himself having to do something antithetical to a race-car driver’s mentality — he actually has to slow down his vehicle.

“If I don’t, I’ll blow my motor up all the time,” he said. “It’s not easy to replace motors.”

Brodovsky also competes in the Pro Gas class because he likes the challenge of manually driving his car. In some other classes, electronics do much of the work for the drivers, he said.

Brodovsky recently drove in one of California’s most popular drag races, the March Meet at Bakersfield’s Famoso Raceway, and will start his second season of racing with the West Coast Pro Gas Association next week. He finished fifth in last year’s WCPGA points standings.

And he’s doing it in a car that Matthew McConaughey’s muscle car-loving character from the hit movie “Dazed and Confused” would drool over.

“The 1971 Plymouth Barracuda is one of the most sought-after muscle cars in the world,” said Brodovsky, whose car has close to 900 horsepower, quite a bit more than the “turbo-jet 390” in the Chevrolet Chevelle Super Sport that McConaughey’s character drove. “Some people pay upwards of $1 million for them, and I’ve always loved them. It’s a great car, it’s timeless, and I thought it would be great to race a ‘Cuda at that level.”

Of course, the Barracuda isn’t street legal. With gigantic rear wheels and tiny front wheels, the car is only meant to go in one direction — straight to the finish line.

“With the tiny tires, it’s not really made to steer around corners,” Brodovsky said. “It overcorrects very quickly, and you have to play the game with it and smooth it out.

“The car gets towed to the starting line, and then it gets towed back to the pit straight afterward. It only goes a quarter-mile at a time.”

As much as he enjoys drag racing, Brodovsky is a police officer at heart, which is why he hopes to use his sport as a way to reach out to teenagers.

“Being a cop, you’re kind of an enemy to kids, and what I try to do as a drag racer is try to relate to kids,” he said. “There are a lot of them out there that are involved in illegal street racing. I try to relate to them by bringing them out to the track. I’ll go up against them anytime — I have no problem.

“It’s not cool to put everyone else’s lives in jeopardy by going out and running fast on the streets. Go out, run fast and have a good time — just do it legally, on a track where it’s safe.”