Speed Launches 'Big Block Thursday' on July 16

Speed's launching what it calls "Big Block Thursday" on July 16, with episodes of Pinks All Out, Wrecked and Jacked.

"We won't be giving viewers a lot of time to catch their breath," Speed SVP of programming Steve Craddock said in a release. "Each of the three programs has an identity all its own, but a shared level of palpable intensity that keeps you wondering what will happen next."

Pinks All Out (pictured) is back for a third season with some cast changes (though iconic host Rich Christensen is still on board), at 8 p.m. ET. Drag-racing tracks including Indianapolis and Bakersfield, Calif., get visited this season, and a highlight will be the Aug. 6 edition, featuring first-time four-wide racing from zMAX Dragway in Concord, N.C. -- an event taped in front of a sellout crowd of more than 30,000 spectators. That episode also features an overhead "Fly Cam" racing overhead at up to 90 m.p.h.

"Every weekend at drag strips all across the country, racers line up and do this for nothing more than the adrenaline rush of beating the guy in the next lane ... for most of them, it's a way of life," Speed president Hunter Nickell said in the release. "Pinks All Out shines the spotlight on these grassroots heroes and captures that feeling we all have experienced at a stoplight once or twice ... foot on the gas, engine revving ... and magnifies it by about a trillion."

New to Speed this year is Jacked (9 p.m. ET), a show that ran first on A&E. It takes viewers along for a high-definition ride with the Auto Theft Task Force in Northern New Jersey. Highly trained officers, known as the "Wolf Pack," give viewers an inside look at the rarely seen stealth tactics used to put car thieves behind bars.

The second season of Wrecked (10 p.m. ET) follows the exploits of Chicago-based, family-owned O'Hare Towing & Recovery as the Gratziannas and their crew take on some of the most dramatic roadside mega-cleanups in one of the busiest transportation hubs in the country.

Fox Cable Networks outlet Speed will offer a "sneak peek" at the season premiere of Pinks All Out, from Montgomery, Ala.,to cable operators for use on their VOD platforms, while SPEEDtv.com will support both Pinks All Out and Wrecked with micro-sites featuring personality pages, photos and full-length episodes from the current and prior seasons.

Pinks All Out and Wrecked long-form content will be distributed on iTunes, Hulu and Sprint, with "best of" clips available on iTunes, Sprint, AT&T and MobiTV.