= new reply since forum marked as read
I imprinted on both when I was ten years old and Hot Rod Magazine had Big Daddy Don Garlits, the official NHRA Number One Drag Racer of all time, on the cover for an article revealing all his speed secrets. Which he did by taking his Top Fuel dragster completely apart at Hurst Performance in PA for pictures of every single trick engineering detail he used at the time.
Sunday Sunday Sunday Irwindale! Big John Mazmanian! Gas Rhonda! Stone Woods and Cook! Lions Drag Strip! Orange County International. blown and on fuel! Drag City! Beach Blanket Bingo. The Uncertain-T. George Barris, Ed Big Daddy Roth, Dean Jeffries (created the Monkeemobile, among many other historic hot rod accomplishments) Von Dutch the guy that invented flame painting and hot rod abstract pin striping.
Off the top of my head. So-cal in the mid sixties, the high water mark for American middle class prosperity that has been slowly taken away from us ever since.
Which brings me to comment on the obligations of citizenship. 9-11 was thirteen years ago. I feel an obligation to tell younger people America wasn't always thus. It wasn't an Ayn Rand survival of the fittest I got mine and screw you and we're all corporate serfs now. There was widespread shared economic prosperity, brought about by the reforms of the Depression and America winning WW2 without losing any of our infrastructure to bombing or anything to curb our righteous industrial might.
And life goes on. Surprisingly, one of the most appealing trends in modern drag racing is NOSTALGIA NITRO, facsimiles of the rather dangerous front engine dragsters (aka: "rail jobs"
and flip top fuel funny cars are raced enthusiastically all over the country these days. (With 50 years of evolved safety tech to minimize but not eliminate the inherent danger of these or any other form of high speed race car) Striving to reach what was possible in the mid 60's - three or four guys with good jobs could go race nitro dragsters with their overtime pay!
And thanks to social media a fanboy like me can interact with the grey beards that did it back in the day.
This article, written by my internet car buddy Cole Coonce, is probably one of the best written pieces to capture the pioneering mid sixties American can-do spirit. It's also sad, because after the Surfers walked away from dragster racing, their gifted driver Mike Sorokin, continued his driving career and was killed when the newly developed slipper clutches that kept the tires from smoking sliced his car in half when the clutch exploded at the finish line. The driver's position in a 60's F.E.D straddled the entire drive line.
http://www.hotrod.com/features/history/stories/hrdp-9810-southern-california-top-fuel-movement/
-90% Jimmy
PS - it's in my DU profile, but 90% is a reference to the maximum percentage of nitro allowed in modern NHRA Top Fuel Dragsters and Fuel Funny Cars, which no longer run the full quarter mile. It's now legislated to 1,000 feet after the tragic death of second generation fuel racer Scott Kalitta in 2008. His car blew up at the finish line, which is still pretty commonplace, but the explosion hung the throttle open and Scott was probably unconscious and ran into a big camera boom at the end of the track at perhaps 250 MPH. Modern cars also have radio controlled parachutes and throttle actuation to also prevent such a tragedy from ever happening again. Scott's dad is Connie Kalitta who is still out there racing with a three car team. His airline company has probably received millions of taxpayer dollars as he did a lot of contract work for the government flying stuff back and forth to the Middle East Wars since the Iraq invasion. Connie was played by Beau Bridges in the 1984 Shirley Muldowney biopic "Heart Like a Wheel"
